Symantec Client Management Suite is designed to automate time-consuming and redundant tasks for deploying, managing, patching, and securing desktops and laptops so organizations can reduce the cost and effort of managing Windows, Mac, Linux, and virtual desktop environments.
If you are looking for a client management suite to perform patch, software delivery, and inventory I think Symantec is great. I would recommend it without a doubt if it was in your budget. If you are a very small company and don't use these features to often then I think it would depend on your budget.
The best part is it provides you with the full view of your client life cycle of devices, along with the integration of other Symantec products like endpoint security.
Creating an audit report and keeping it in a single dashboard is also easy. UI is simple.
One of the best benefits of this tool is you can install it enterprise-wide along with onsite employees.
CMS is quite clunky sometimes and the Silverlight interface is acceptable at best. Many improvements have been made in this area, particularly with performance, but the interface still needs a lot of work. When it becomes 100% HTML5 with proper compliance browser support I'll be happy!
Support at Symantec isn't that great. Client Management Suite isn't even listed on the Support Portal when trying to open a ticket. Your best bet for support is actually the user groups that Symantec hosts. The members of the groups are usually very responsive. With Broadcom buying Symantec, I've seen a huge jump in personnel leaving Symantec, so I'm assuming the support is just going to get worse. Recently for a simple question, I reached out to 5 people just to find out 4 of the 5 had left the company.
Currently, I can't take a position [on how Symantec compares] because when I took position at my job, Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) was already implanted. We're currently looking to try Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager to see if it'd be a contender for CMS. The reason is that we have special support contract directly with Microsoft. So instead of managing multiple contracts, we would only have one. But for now, we're all set up with Symantec so it'd take something great from SCCM to make us switch from one to another.
Better efficiency through image creation, deployment and EOL as single Hardware Independent Images can be created for a large number of devices and then all managed on the same pane of glass.
Customer service is better because we can provide software across campus almost as fast as requested for one user or hundreds of users, all by a single technician without ever having to leave an office.
