Symantec Client Management Suite Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 7.1 out of 10

Score

7.1 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Symantec Client Management Suite are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

Symantec products have become essential tools for organizations looking to efficiently manage their IT desktop assets. Service technicians rely on Symantec's solutions to deploy and support large volumes of computers, ensuring that clients have up-to-date and secure systems. One popular tool, the Symantec Management Platform Client Management Suite, offers a comprehensive set of features for inventory management, software delivery, patch management, and imaging of both Windows and Mac workstations. Another widely used solution is the Symantec Client Management Suite, which enables organizations to handle tasks such as patch management, software delivery, inventory management, custom inventory creation, reporting, and IT analytics across their entire environment.

Symantec's products excel at automating cumbersome processes and facilitating the efficient distribution of software updates through their Peer to Peer software deployment feature. This eliminates the need for distribution servers and streamlines software distribution across an organization's network. Moreover, Symantec Management Platform is a global solution that effectively manages end user machines and servers, providing reliable software installations, upgrades, patches, and monitoring capabilities. Institutions like Oxford University rely on Altiris CMS within the Symantec Management Platform to gain control over managed software delivery, access thorough inventory information, and conduct incident remediation.

Symantec Client Management Suite shines when it comes to imaging computers, remote software installation, inventory management, and trend analysis. It serves as a centralized hub for collecting hardware and operating system information while providing comprehensive software inventory and metering capabilities. Additionally, Symantec Client Management Suite is chosen by organizations worldwide to ensure endpoints are kept up to date with crucial software updates and Windows patches. The suite's integration with Symantec endpoint protection further enhances security measures and safeguards sensitive data.

A testament to its scalability and efficiency is how Symantec Client Management Suite successfully supports organizations managing over 35K endpoints. It simplifies day-to-day processes by facilitating gold image builds, software delivery, patch management, and asset management. Ultimately, the suite's ability to execute tasks seamlessly and generate detailed reports for management makes it a go-to solution for organizations across various industries.

Reviews

14 Reviews

Symantec Client Management Suite offers good value

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 28, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Symantec Client Management Suite across the whole environment. We use it to manage all our workstations and several of our servers. Specifically, we use it for patching, software deployment, blacklisting applications, and asset inventory. We particularly like the direction that Symantec has gone with software deployment. Symantec allows the use of Peer to Peer software deployment which limits the need for distribution servers in the network. We've been using it quite successfully with some of our smaller locations.

Pros

Patch management.
Software deployment.

Cons

Licensing is a pain.
Application metering while works can bog down a computer if not careful.

Likelihood to Recommend

Patching and Software Deployment are the strong points for Symantec Client Management Suite. We don't really use Symantec Client Management for Desktop Imaging, we prefer to use MDT, however we are just starting to investigate using Symantec Client Management to do Windows 10 servicing and so far it looks really good.

The direction that Symantec has started with peer to peer, in my mind, made it a solid solution. The peer to peer function allowed us to reduce our overall infrastructure, primarily with smaller sites

If you want to use Symantec Client Management Suite for blacklisting applications, be very careful. It's a resource hog. It works well if you have an emergency and want to block chrome from running due to a Zero-Day, but it's not something that you want to have a lot of policies running.

Ted Jan

VP Technical Services in Information Technology at Guggenheim Partners (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

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Symantec Client Management Suite is a solid Endpoint Management suite

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 19, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Symantec Client Management (SMP) is being used throughout our entire organization on all of our desktops, laptops, and eventually servers. We have been a Symantec shop for almost as long as I have been with the company which is almost 20 years. We rely on SMP to keep all of our endpoints up to date with software updates as well as Windows Patches.

Pros

You can do just about anything you would need to do as far as client management needs
In place upgrades are a breeze
Inventory management, Patch management are very intuitive.

Cons

Feature updates are lacking, but getting better
Reporting could be improved
GUI needs to be updated

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need to manage a lot of endpoints SMP is a solid choice. We have over 8000 endpoints and SMP allows me to keep all devices up to date as well as track what software is currently installed. I do not know that I would recommend SMP to a small business as there can be a steep learning curve to fully utilizing SMP. You really need at least one person dedicated to managing the SMP.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Best Enterprise Class Client Management Suite

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 12, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Symantec is the real-time client management tool using by our complete organization. The suite also integrates with the Symantec endpoint protection to provide superior security and data safety in cases of loss and theft. Higher availability for Mac, Linux and Windows platform. It is the best in class solution, and provides everything you need out of the box CMDB. It also improves the business process system and customer services. This solution has also stretched into business process automation through integrations with HR systems, and external systems such as CRM and Cloud-Based Files Services.

Pros

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.
Symantec is having great customer support.

Cons

With Symantec, setting permission sets is difficult. The very vast product takes time to learn.
The UI can be more intuitive and match the new market. It looks 90's.

Likelihood to Recommend

For large enterprises, Symantec Client Management is really great to manage all the systems across locations, if it's for installation, software, licenses or even status. Also the patch, software delivery, and inventory of Symantec CMS are great.

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

My Symantec Client Management Suite Review

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

September 4, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used this product in the past 12 months to manage devices and software throughout their entire lifecycle. The solution is ideal for Windows, Mac and VM environments. It's a great deployment tool for patching and securing both desktop computers and mobile devices such as laptops.

Pros

Asset Management is a great way to manage your devices.
End Point Protection minimizes your risk of being affected by a zero-day vulnerability.
Symantec Client Suite allows you to enforce standard policies and make them consistent across the network.

Cons

Symantec Management Agent Admin Console interface could be enhanced to a more modern, user friendly system.
Dashboard display settings could be modernized to allow additional customization.
EPM would be a great way to manage mobile devices also like a Mobile device Management tool.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are looking for a tool for patching and managing your endpoints this is a great system. For Windows patches, it resembles WSUS from Microsoft, in the sense that you can focus on pushing out the Critical and Security Updates first.

Mauro Carrillo

Chief Information Technology Officer in Information Technology at Drummond Community Bank (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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A management console every IT team should have

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

March 14, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) is currently used for 90% of our operation on our business computers. We use it to image the computers with a pre-defined image of Windows with custom settings for the computer. We customized it by looking up the computer model so it automatically fetches the right drivers. After this it is used to remotely install most of our softwares and keep and inventory of those. The computers are all filtered by department. We also use the data from CMS to keep inventory and trend of our computer inventory for the future (what we will be our needs in 6 months and 12 months). And finally, we use the automation policy to push specific fixes, software or updates to all the computers or specific department.

Pros

Keeping track of your all your managed computers.
Keeping track of your licences and number of installation for a specified software.
Imaging a computer with an adaptive driver installation.
Unattended remote installation (when available and compatible).

Cons

Flexibility: Some newer software that are cloud based or updates that are now cloud-based aren't really compatible.
The link between your computer inventory and your active directory could be easier to set up.
No way to resume a job from a specific step if it failed (you have to restart it completely).

Likelihood to Recommend

Whenever you have computers that aren't easily accessible or you have a big site to cover (or multi location), Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) is really great to manage all your computers, if it's for installation, software, licenses or even status. Setting up all you need from CMS can take some time, especially when you're in a multi-location site. We had to ask the Symantec engineers to help us a couple of times and set things up because even if we followed the documentation, it wasn't an easy task. But at least, the Symantec engineers are people that know what they do and they're really efficient at it.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Symantec Client Management Suite

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 1, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use Symantec Client Management Suite internally and provide administration for three customers. We currently manage over 10,000 endpoints across several Symantec Management Platforms. Our largest use of the console is with Patch Management, Software Delivery, Inventory, Custom Inventory, Reporting and IT Analytics. Patch Management allows us to be somewhat creative with policy and filters to manage patch compliance across all Windows platforms. Software Delivery provides us the 'set it and forget" by utilizing compliance checks. The new 7.6 platform has better capabilities around importing and managing software. Inventory now provides a nice flip book page for agent health statistics. There are several scripting languages provided within the console to help you easily custom script inventory. Reporting can be done from an ad hoc perspective within the Activity Center if you're not a SQL guru. Otherwise there are several predefined reports, SQL creation tools, copying and editing tool or you can find many reports on Symantec Connect.

Pros

Software Delivery has great features like compliance checking, custom compliance inventory and execution reporting. Once compliance has been configured you can leave the policy active and if the software is uninstalled the policy will reinstall the software.
The ability to use different scripting to create custom inventory. If you're good with scripting and SQL the platform can be utilized as a configuration manager.
The ease of setting up the Symantec Management Platform 7.6 is easier and faster than previous versions. The use of the Symantec Installation Manager performs pre checks to identify areas or applications that may need to be installed and the links provided are up to date.

Cons

I would like to see some improvement around filters as it pertains to making a report from a filter. This would be great for end users that are not familiar with database schema.
MAC patch management could improve by creating more policy based options.
Please allow custom data class guides to remain the same after they are updated.

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe any business can benefit from the Symantec Management Platform. If you're looking for a tool that can image, configure, patch, deliver software, inventory and report on multiple platforms to include MAC, Windows, Linux then I would recommend Symantec Management Platform. Of course any investment needs to have a better return so the ROI may not meet the needs for everyone.

Jason Iloff

Altiris Product Owner in Information Technology at Secure-24 (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

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Great solution for large enterprise environment

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 26, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We manage a huge client environment with about two thousand clients and the responsibilities include software delivery, patch management, inventory collection etc. The SMP makes all this quite easy to do. It has the ability to create sites based on geographical location and subnets and also the bandwidth throttling feature is quite helpful to ensure that the networks don't get overloaded while delivering software and patches.

Pros

Flexibility of filters makes it very easy to create any kind of computer collections imaginable that can be then used for deliveries.
The console is very easy to navigate and has a lot of different functionalities that make managing huge environments a breeze, so even people without vast experience in the field can accomplish quite a lot.
Huge amount of data that can be collected from the clients enables one to create many different reports required by the business.

Cons

PCAnywhere got discontinued without any suitable replacement.
No integration with the mobile management suite.
Some bugs here and there, though Symantec support tries to get this sorted on, the soonest once reported.

Likelihood to Recommend

For anyone that manages a large estate of clients, 10,000+ there are not many options on the market to choose from. Basically it comes down to Symantec or Microsoft and from what I know, Microsoft's product doesn't offer such a verbose logging for troubleshooting issues and it probably requires higher technical skills.

Filip Grasheski

Principal System Support Specialist / Service Owner in Information Technology at DHL (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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Symantec CMS (Cool-Magic-Spy) Client Management Suite 7.*

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 11, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have implemented the Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) to get control over all end user machines, desktops laptops and tablets. We collect hardware and operating system information to assist in asset management. We collect software inventory and metering for license harvesting. We detect and deploy patches and distribute software requested by users. We have customized the Symantec Client Management Suite to detect and reconfigure whatever configuration is required on machines.

Pros

Inventory collection is quite accurate - and customizable as needed.
Software delivery is quite powerful and offers several ways to deploy software to machines and users.
Patch Management currently supports a fair list of vendors and products.
Scaleability allows implementation in wide range of environments.

Cons

CMS Reporting should have a form showing details of one asset (Computer HW+OS+SW) available for user's review.
Pity that vendor dropped Wise Package Studio and integration with anothre SW packaging tool is absent.
Remote Tool (Symantec pcAnywhere) has been dropped recently and CMS users have to look for tool from another vendor.

Likelihood to Recommend

Symantec Client Management Suite can perfectly support corporate devices, but is not quite mature for supporting bring your own device (BYOD).

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

Why we love Symantec Altiris Client Management Suite

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

December 10, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Altiris CMS 7.x is used by many departments in Oxford University. My department uses it mainly for managed software delivery across 3500 nodes, but it's also used for inventory information and 2nd / 3rd line support for incident remediation.

The main business problem it addresses is security compliance, particularly third party plug-ins like Flash Player, Shockwave, JRE, QuickTime etc.

Pros

I doubt that any other technology we could implement would be able to do so much with so little administrative overhead. With a short process that we developed we can quickly get a software package (e.g. IE 11) out to thousands of computers with on-next-reboot remediation and the user is not even aware that anything has happened.
No other solution makes it so easy to create our own tools to plug-in to the CMS toolset. For example our custom scripts can interrogate and manipulate the database to create great bolt-on automated functionality.
Real-time management built in means our second line techs can interrogate problematic computers, and because this is handled via the agent, we do not need the local PC firewall's opened up to half the organisation for WMI.

Cons

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!

Likelihood to Recommend

Most well suited to Windows enterprise management (it can also manage Mac & Linux in some ways but I have no exposure to this) including OS deployment, managed software deployment and security compliance. We have combined it with GSS 3.0 (formerly DS 6.9) to ensure that we have a full 360 degree solution.

Darren Collins

Applications Packaging & Deployment Supervisor in Information Technology at University of Oxford (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

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Symantec Client Management Suite has helped us succeed

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

December 3, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I currently use Symantec Management Platform Client Management Suite. I utilize it for Windows and Mac workstations for: Inventory, Software Delivery, Patch Management, Imaging. Using these components of CMS, we are able to maintain our environment and accurately know what workstations have what software or patch levels. We are also able to identify older hardware and where it may be in the environment in order to provide reports for life cycle replacement.

Pros

Patch Management: We are able to easily deploy patches to all our workstations and accurately report on compliance.
Software Delivery: We do a lot of software deployments to our end users and with CMS we can quickly create policies or tasks to perform these deliveries and get quick results on our success or failures.
Inventory: Ease of use to get reports of what workstations have what software installed, patch levels, or hardware specifications.

Cons

Reporting: I have been using CMS/Altiris since the 6.x version, and while most things have improved in 7.5 that we use today there were some reports that were easier to find or create. While there is an easy way to tell at a quick glance software delivery results, I would like to see a report that more accurately shows success/failure, vs compliance. In the compliance report a non-compliance doesn't really mean it failed, it just means it checked compliance and may or may not have tried to run it and failed.
Imaging: The way it does imaging tasks, could be a lot easier to perform. If you have one common image and application set among your organization then no problem, but if you are more complex and have say 40 different application sets as we do it can be very complex to manage and configure.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Dan Kujala

Endpoint Engineer III in Information Technology at Grainger (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

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Symantec Client Management Suite

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 1, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Software Delivery has great features like compliance checking, custom compliance inventory and execution reporting. Once compliance has been configured you can leave the policy active and if the software is uninstalled the policy will reinstall the software.
The ability to use different scripting to create custom inventory. If you're good with scripting and SQL the platform can be utilized as a configuration manager.
The ease of setting up the Symantec Management Platform 7.6 is easier and faster than previous versions. The use of the Symantec Installation Manager performs pre checks to identify areas or applications that may need to be installed and the links provided are up to date.

Cons

I would like to see some improvement around filters as it pertains to making a report from a filter. This would be great for end users that are not familiar with database schema.
MAC patch management could improve by creating more policy based options.
Please allow custom data class guides to remain the same after they are updated.

Likelihood to Recommend

Jason Iloff

Altiris Product Owner in Information Technology at Secure-24 (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

View profile