SmartDeploy, now from PDQ.com (acquired January 2022), provides a software deployment solution supporting computer imaging, app deployment, driver management, and Windows migration.
$960
per year
Symantec Ghost Solution Suite
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Symantec's Ghost Solution Suite is an imaging and deployment solution.
It works really well as an image maintenance and roll-out platform, allowing maintenance of a single "Gold" image. New features allow the deployment of some software packages as part of image deployment. It does not work very well as a maintenance platform in any use for us, but especially not well-suited for Windows 7 to Windows 10 migrations over WAN.
It helps to manage the mass of computers we use. We use GSS to see where and who deployed software to what computers. This can particularly be helpful when dealing with license usage, and tracking how many licenses we have left, and where those licenses have been used. We are able to use it to manage clients.
Remote monitoring is useful but has some lagging and functionalities are not upfront to use , making it complicated for new users to be aware just by using the application
Windows migration was quite difficult in terms of updates of softwares to be migrated to new system
Integration with client systems can be tough as major usage of other softwares is done in most of client systems causing us difficulties to integrate with smart deploy on the same platform
Even though Ghost Solution Suite saves configurations, software settings and installation within the image, there is still some manual configuration that needs to be done once the image is complete.
Installing Drivers for specific models of computers. With Ghost Solution Suite, it can be difficult to get the drivers for all the hardware of all the different model computers, so you have to create different images for different model computers. It would be nice to have the ability to have a hardware independent image for all model computers
Image Size. Ghost does have compression to reduce the size of the image, but when you have to store all the drivers within the image it increases the total size of the image you need to manage.
SmartDeploy customer support has been very good. Although we do not always get a super-fast response (though always within the time stated). The tech support folks at SmartDeploy always go the extra mile to see that our immediate issues are taken care of in as timely a manner as possible. They have always been attentive to our needs and frustrations.
SmartDeploy has a fantastic deployment process management with detailed and configurable aspects. Even though it has detailed configuration it still somehow makes it easy to understand and implement compared to other services which need special learning and courses to understand them completelya and use them efficiently. This is one quality highly appreciated and stacks up against any other services I have used for deployment
Based on our particular company needs, we selected Ghost primarily for the cost. There are better products out there to deploy new computers. KACE was one of the products tested. I used KACE at a previous company and I can say KACE is a more effective deployment method, but the cost prevented us form going with this product. Also, since we have one single standard image it was very easy to manage Ghost for all our employee computers. We also standardized to one single hardware model computer which also made the decision to use Ghost easier.
New application created was deployed by SmartDeploy and saved us 20% of our deployment time on whole project providing us major time to build new functionalities and release product earlier
Computer imaging was quite elaborate and yet simple, making it helpful for our client system creation activity. Which helped us bag us new activities of system creation for more projects.
Driver management was causing lots of time consumption for system management team. Which in-turn reduced their focus on actual system issues. With SmartDeploy it helped in improving efficiency of 30% for system management team
