Good morning, I am supposed to propose the pros and cons of SCCM vs Patchlink. I have a few questions and would greatly appreciate feedback. 1. For 400 machines what would the average database size be excluding images if we plan to utilize all features of SCCM? An educated guess works. 2. What does SCCM offer greater then Patchlink regarding asset intelligence? Thanks!

There are too many variables to give you a nice number, How often are you going to do Inventory, What about SW metering? How many rules? Etc.. IMO it should not matter how big the DB is, the question is which give you what you want. I’m not sure many of us have “played” with Patchlink, so I’m not sure what type of answers you will get. You should also look at SCE to see if it fits your needs http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/essentials.aspx http://www.enhansoft.com/

Our environment includes 100 servers, and 400 workstations. We plan to use SCCM to deploy operating systems, inventory current hardware, and software. I have to propose to benefits of SCCM over Patchlink for both patching and inventory since this is what patchlink offers. Thank you

Well, I can't really help you with how much better ConfigMgr might be over Patchlink, since I've never used Patchlink. For patching and inventory in ConfigMgr, what I can say about that is the following. For Patching, it's based on WSUS scans; and you can deploy the normal patch Tuesday-type Security updates quickly and in various ways (ranging from more user interaction to very little user interaction). Additionally, there is a tool called SCUP (free), System Center Updates Publisher; using that you can either get the pre-built rules that some vendors provide, or roll your own, to push out updates to non-Microsoft software, Angie Stahl has blogged how to update Adobe Acrobat using SCUP for example: http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/katzchen63/archive/tags/SCUP/default.aspx For inventory, I've inventoried some of the craziest things; if it's available on the client, we can get it. Additionally, think past "inventory", and also think about DCM (Desired Configuration Management). For about 70% of what people ask for me for custom information, instead of using traditional inventory methods, what they really want to know is "for computers with application Y, they need to have Regkey X Value"--that's perfect for a DCM custom rule. Also, I don't know how rich the community is around Patchlink. There is a rich forum and blog presence for ConfigMgr; here, and another popular web site is http://www.myitforum.com, as well as several international ones that might interest you if your first language is not English. If you have questions about how something works in ConfigMgr, you just need to post your question, and someone will help you through your issue. Perhaps I should ask this: what is the nuttiest thing your management has ever asked you to get information about in the past? One of us could tell you how we'd get that information with ConfigMgr. That example might help you understand what ConfigMgr has vs. Patchlink. Standardize. Simplify. Automate.

Thank you for this info. My management wants to have it so they can inventory a active directory OU and know exactly what hardware, software, memory, user, and processor are in that specific OU or the entire active directory structure. Is that hard to do with SCCM?

Not at all, it's no big deal at all. You need three basic pre-requisites, and then work on your part to create custom reports to filter by OU. 1. The client installed on those computers. 2. The discovery method called "Active Directory System Group Discovery" enabled, so that OU membership is detected and merged with the client data in the database. 3. To get "Top Console User", you may have to enable a GPO so that the logon information is recorded in the Security Event Log, so that the ConfigMgr client can figure out the top console user, and report it, so you get get the UserName like you asked for. And enabling the Console Usage classes in Inventory (I think that's off by default). Then all that's necessary is to clone existing reports (or create your own), and add in a "where" clause so that you filter to something like "Where OU Like 'mydomain.com/FirstOU/Second OU/%' fyi, where I work, our default method for filtering is by OU. OU is a very popular method to filter reports. About the only thing to caution you about would be when the boss' ask for "All software on every computer". That report would kill a couple of trees' worth of paper, or never be processed. It's basically them asking you to dump the information from the SQL databas into a single, two-level spreadsheet. Not a relational database like SQL. So pretty much tell them that the information is all there--but they need to give you more parameters than just "everything about everything" That's just TMI; and useless to them for making decisions.Standardize. Simplify. Automate.