The road to SMS 2003 has been arduous, but the destination is worth a look

After fits, starts, and yet a few restarts, Systems Management Server 2003 is finally available. We (my pack of consultants and I) have been dinging around with SMS 2003 since the first beta, and it’s been quite an adventure. But the long road has been worth the trouble.

We decided to take SMS 2003 out of the test lab and into the field mainly because Microsoft’s re-released the beta. This struck us as a commitment on Redmond’s part, so we wanted to see what the Starbucks spawners really had percolating.

This posed a few problems, because none of us had paid too much attention to SMS 2.0. That’s because although it was billed as a desktop management suite, it really wasn’t much good for anything besides pushing out Microsoft software releases and updates, and it even had trouble doing that. The list of new capabilities that Redmond published for SMS 2003, coupled with its publishing a new version of the beta, piqued our interest enough to see if the billing could live up to the reality.

Another snag was that we manage multiple clients remotely from a single location. This was doable via SMS, but it wasn’t not straightforward and involved a number of trouble incidents before we figured out the right combination of firewall configuration, VPN client and client-side server support.

So far, SMS 2003 has been a boon for the larger customers. The new Advanced Client, while engendering a painful upgrade process, has allowed us to develop an almost completely user-driven software installation process. With SMS 2003, users can now access new software, obtain a license key and begin a remote installation, all without administrator intervention. That said, while the license-key portion of that equation works fine with Microsoft products, it usually requires more administrator intervention if the installation is from another software vendor.

Another key win SMS 2003 has given us is in mobile management. A few of our clients are comprised mostly of mobile and remote workers accessing a central server bank. The rewritten Advanced Client, which is considerably smaller and more agile than in SMS 2.0, is the first benefit that mobile managers will notice. Our only trouble with it was convincing a few Windows 98-notebook holdouts to upgrade to Windows 2000 or later; Advanced Client won’t run on anything else. The old client is supposed to work fine with SMS 2003, but when it comes to Microsoft, the safest bet is to stick to the newer operating systems, so we use whatever leverage we can get to move our clients along.

The real gold for mobile folks, once we worked the kinks out, is SMS 2003’s BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service). This allows remote users to install software updates with the capability of  resuming an installation in case the session is interrupted. That means remote users can begin an installation as time permits and continue it from multiple locations on their journey without shedding tears on the phone with tech support. Out of 90 mobile users that have just a single client, we’ve only had one casualty in this regard thus far.

Is SMS 2003 an automatic lock for any business? I wouldn’t go that far. Although we use SMS quite a bit for moving software around, we’re also big fans of LANDesk for more mundane day-to-day desktop management needs (such as your typical help-desk chores). And LANDesk has distribution capability of its own. I’ll be getting more into LANDesk in the next column, but meanwhile, do yourself a favor and check out SMS 2003. It’s not the best for all situations, but it’s aggressively priced and a definite contender.