Endpoint Central is a great product to support your IT ecosystem
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We leverage almost all features of EndPoint Central to manage our endpoints, all operating systems are supported. The product allows you to deploy patch, packages, a self-service portal is available to the users, you can monitor encryption, manage inventory (software and hardware) as well as application blacklisting/whitelisting. It successfully achieves the goal of controling, operating maintenances and remotely managing our endpoints.
Pros
- Deploying packages and maintaining our software up-to-date
- Collecting hardware and software inventory
- Generating reports (OOTB or Custom)
- Offering tons of features in a single interface
Cons
- The patching and vulnerability management features provides misconfigurations reports but is not always helpful as of how to fix it
- The patch management feature doesn't really allow you to exclude and justify why, sometimes products can't be patched but a remmediation exists
- The dashboard of vulnerabilities take into accounts all machines which create a false sentiment of being behind while some machines might be off for a long time for a reason (only way is to delete them which makes you lose track of the asset in your inventory)
- The whitelisting feature will find thousands of applications, there is no convenient way to go around and to whitelist them without spending hours and hours on it
- The encryption/bitlocker feature doesn't allow to encrypt the device remotely
Return on Investment
- Positive impact in helping IT patch more effectively as well as bring dashboards to oversee the state of the overall IT assets
- Negative impact is minor as we would want additional features which will help with our user acceptance when patching their environment
- Another aspect is that Manage Engine doesn't take into account when you have multiple of their products, and this is unfortunate as one might expect discount granted you are a loyal customer and are investing time and money into their products (as well as providing quality feedbacks for them to improve)
Usability
Alternatives Considered
EMCO MSI Package Builder, EMCO Remote Installer and Microsoft System Center
Other Software Used
ManageEngine AssetExplorer, ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer, ManageEngine Log360
