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Senior Systems Engineer in Information Technology at Associated Press (1001-5000 employees employees)
Pros
Being able to manage and report on our entire enterprise infrastructure from a single pane of glass is very handy!
Deploying patches via the SMP can be a little complicated, but once you figure out exactly how to do it, it works very well!
Building system images with the SMP is an easy process. I build a VM with the software I want, and then run a job that prepares the system for image capture (runs sysprep, wipes the SMP GUID, etc) and then boots into WinPE and captures the image via Ghost.
Cons
The SMP solution is a beast. Each piece is complicated in itself let alone how everything ties together!
There is plenty of documentation online on how to perform a specific task, but you need to pay attention to what VERSION the article is written for. I've been halfway through implementing something only to hit a roadblock since I'm running a newer version and the option the article says to click on doesn't exist anymore...
Return on Investment
Being able to report on the majority of things you want all from one interface, makes it really easy to get the results you want.
Because my employer didn't provide training, it took working with support, reading technical documentation, and just playing around on my own to learn how to do certain things.
I've had a lot of help from the SMP Support staff and they're great people and very helpful!