Symantec Asset Management Suite

Score6 out of 10

22 Reviews and Ratings

What is Symantec Asset Management Suite?

The Symantec Asset Management Suite aims to help organizations get an accurate picture of their assets, ensure compliance during software audits, avoid vendor penalties and fines and uncover savings by eliminating the purchase of unnecessary licenses.

This IT Asset Management solution is designed to discover, inventory, and track all hardware and software assets in an organization’s IT infrastructure through a CMDB. The CMDB manages assets’ hierarchical relationships to other configuration items, users, locations, departments, cost centers, and associated contracts. According to the vendor, this gives organizations credible information on the location and license status of every important OS, virtualization platform, or application instance. The vendor’s value proposition is that with this detailed, up-to-date information, organizations can quickly identify problems, apply solutions, and document compliance.

Categories & Use Cases

Software Asset Management

Biswajit Tripathy View profile

DGM-IT, IN & VAS in Information Technology at Telenor (India) Communications Pvt Ltd. (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

Helps me control the software license fee by paying only for hardware that is being used. This helps reduce a lot of cost to the company.
Helps manage inventory, audits etc.
It helps control and manage all inventories using CMDB which gives a hierarchy of all information.

Return on Investment

Saved cost by tracking license fees of software.
Helped manage hardware thereby allotment of hardware in time.
Best part was the Audit. Manages audit very well.

Other Software Used

Symantec Advanced Threat Protection, Symantec Client Management Suite, Symantec Endpoint Protection, Symantec Critical System Protection

Roberta Jones View profile

IT Administrative Specialist in Information Technology at Missouri Botanical Garden (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

One of the features that we use Symantec Asset Management Suite for the most is to push out patches and software updates. We have about 750 computer users throughout Missouri Botanical Garden so when IE or Windows requires a patch fix or update, it would take a long to physically visit each computer here and install those updates. Instead we can set up a job through Symantec Asset Management Suite that will automatically push out the patches or software updates to the computers in our organization at a certain time. The job runs automatically and will generate a report when it's finished if any computers failed to update.
Missouri Botanical Garden is considered a "Greeen" organization, therefore we take sustainability seriously and are always looking for ways to save energy. One of the tasks that we have set up as a job in Symantec Asset Management is every evening at 8 pm, it will search for computers that were left on by users and will power them down. This helps us save on energy and allows us to continue our goal of being a sustainable organization. This function also helps when a user is out of the office and needs software installed. The user doesn't have to keep their computer on and waste energy, but instead we can use Symantec's Asset Management Suite to wake the computer up when we are ready to work on it.
Another feature that I really like in the Symantec Asset Management Suite is the ability to create a job that will automate software installations. For instance, I have a job set up that will automatically install Office Suite 2016 to a user's computer. I just have to select the job with the Symantec Console, then drag and drop it on the computer number that I need to install it on. Once I drag and drop the job onto the computer number in the console, the command box on the computer where the software is being installed briefly opens showing the computer has received the job and it is running in the background. I refresh the console every so often to see if the job is finished, but the console takes care of everything automatically in regards to the software being installed.

Cons

Symantec Asset Management Suite is a really great product for any organization to use for managing their computers. One of the main issues that we run into when using Asset Management Suite are problems with user permissions after updating the software. Whenever we update the software, we have to redo the permissions for users because when they try to log in they get an error stating that they are not authorized to use the software.
Other issues that I've seen with Symantec Asset Management Suite are problems with pushing jobs out to computers. For the most part, this function usually runs smoothly, but sometimes, the jobs will not push out to the computers and we have to install the updates ourselves manually. At times it's hard to tell if the job is actually running or not because the console will say that it's pushing the job to the computer, but then it freezes up and the job never actually starts. When you refresh the console, sometimes it will report that the job is running, but it's actually not running at all.
Another issue that I've had with Symantec Asset Management Suite is getting the console to run in my internet browser. Whenever I clicked the shortcut link to open the console, IE would give me an error that it needed to be updated and that the console could not run without the update. I updated my Internet Explorer to the latest version, but still could not get the console to run. So I had to uninstall the console, reinstall it, and redo the permissions to get it to work.

Return on Investment

Our ROI has been positive. We have Symantec Management Suite set up to notify us when desktops reach 5 years of age so that we can perform refreshes in a more timely manner. Before we used this feature, we had computers that were over 10 years old that were actually assigned to users. Users were unable to perform their job functions which caused our organization to lose money because we were not meeting deadlines.
Another feature that our organization was able to benefit from was the software management tools. After re-imaging computers, we would run into issues where users would state that they had a certain software installed and that we didn't put it back on after the re-image. We had no way of knowing if the user had the software or not so we would have to go and buy an additional software license for the user. Now with the software management tools in Altiris we can generate a report that will tell us what software is installed on each computer.
We can also use the backup and restore features to track what was installed on a computer before it was reimaged. This also cuts down on the amount of time that we spent in the past trying to complete manual backups of our computers and restoring them back to how they originally were. Now we only have to spend time updating Symantec Management Suite whenever an update is available.

Alternatives Considered

TeamViewer

Other Software Used

Eset Smart Security, Apple iCloud, Skype for Business

Brandan Kusser View profile

End User Computing Technician in Information Technology at SmartPak (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

Asset tracking - Very important in a business
Reports - Keep track of what programs are installed, who has which computer, etc.

Cons

Overhead - Time Consuming to manage
User Interface - Not a problem per se, but the UI could be updated to look more modern.
Speed - Occasionally, Symantec was a little slow, but that could have been due to our huge enviroment. It was nothing crippling.

Return on Investment

Much faster time finding out what equipment belongs to who, especially if this info is needed and the person is unavailable.
Better "Customer Service" (Tech to end user)

Greg Ragozzino View profile

Consultant in Information Technology at Attentus, Inc. (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

Application update is SAM Suite's strong point.
SAM Suite has good remote control.
The PXE server for imaging works well.

Cons

Would like to an easier install of the SAM Suite packages.
Use of one console for all products.
Easier scripting.

Return on Investment

Negative - Requires staff training.
Positive - Has easy access to Asset Management
Apple products work with the Asset Management package.

Other Software Used

Symantec Endpoint Protection, Symantec Backup Exec

Alex Hedley View profile

Symantec Workflow Process Analyst in Information Technology at Protirus - A Professional Services Company (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

You can send tasks, using various languages, down to a machine using the SMP
You can patch machines with an agent
There are great reporting capabilities

Cons

Reliance on Silverlight and Internet Explorer, although it's moving to HTML5.

Return on Investment

Automation of jobs or pre built tasks allows anyone to perform an action they may have not be able to do otherwise.

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What is Symantec Asset Management Suite?

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

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Pros

Return on Investment

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