System Center

Pros

Excellent services It seems to me that their way of helping the client and fulfilling all their needs is really good.

Cons

I have no complaints about System Center, their services have been very effective and fast. Very good.

Pros

- It can be unified with Active Directory and DHCP to locate any computer that is connected to the network.
- You can deploy Windows desktop and Windows server updates automatically or manually.
- You can implement any application or shortcut.
- Most impressive is the ease with which you can implement operating systems through the network.
- When you deploy an application, update or operating system, you can easily see the progress of the implementation.
- Has a wide range of created reports.
- Can generate Querys according to the need of the company.
- SCCM has its own remote connection system that provides great help at the time of remote technical support.
- You can set up an "SCCM server" or a "distribution point" in each location you need to avoid bandwidth consumption.
- It has a great security to establish the differences between the roles of the different areas of the company that require the use of the tool.
- You can use the LOG as they are very useful.

Cons

- Microsoft System Center is a very expensive tool
- It requires many pre requisites for the installation of the SCCM in a server.
- The set-up requires many hours of work so that SCCM is 100% configured
- The creation of additional reports is very complicated.
- Generating Querys in SCCM does not have much documentation and is really difficult.
- You really need to do a course to be able to use the tool.
- Many errors of the tool are basic and do not show details.
- It is complicated to verify the installation of Windows updates.

Pros

Given proper support from MS premium channels, and humans dedicated to supporting the software, you can automate/manage endpoints and servers very effectively with System Center Configuration Manager. Monitoring can be very in-depth with Operations Manager, with a central application to monitor your enterprise environment and custom alerts that pertain to each system or service. This is a very powerful set of software, and with the proper resources allocated to it, can be scaled across even large enterprises.

Cons

Each software package with the System Center umbrella of software should not be underestimated. Each one required a full commitment to understand, deploy and utilize effectively. I would not recommend these solutions to small IT shops that cannot commit the appropriate human resource and support, as it will be draining to get the value out of them.

Reasons for this discouragement: These software packages are nothing like Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, nor MS SQL. The flow and design of System Center packages are very different, and the concepts driving their design and use can be very challenging to understand and remember for beginners. I recommend committed staff assigned to these applications for support.

Pros

I have experience in System Center Configuration Manager and the Operating System Deployment (OSD) has saved lot of man hours in company wide when re-configuring or deploying PCs over company. We can deploy a new PC with all relevant software and updates without single user interaction in less than 1 hour of time. The software center is a feature where users can self service software installation and OS upgrade for Windows 10 very easily.

Cons

The automated client deployment is giving trouble most of the time if the remote end is miss configured firewall or corrupted WMI. We have to sort those problems manually if we encounter such a problem.

Pros

For over the last 10 years I've worked with pretty much all products in system center suite. Mostly with SCOM and SCCM. These Products are massive, but there is nothing better when it comes to software delivery, patching, monitoring etc. !

Cons

the learning curve of the System Center Products is steep. it takes time to master. Sometime it could get expensive to get the right people to involve in supporting and administering these products.

Pros

We use SCCM for everything. Imaging, software deployment, patch management, Windows 10 servicing, antivirus, hardware/software inventory. Log files make it easy to fix errors when they do occur.

Ability to build flexible images and inject drivers and software during the imaging process (task sequence).

Cons

It takes a long time to get familiar with the software. If you're going to have multiple administrators, a lot of training may be required.

Pros

SCCM is a solid enterprise management solution for doing routine patching, monitoring, and reactive maintenance on enterprise PCs. The application is scalable in the sense that additional management servers can be created to address growth. Devices are monitored by agents that provide a basic heartbeat and basic device status information. Standard reports and queries are available out of the box.

Cons

SCCM is a costly application both monetarily and in terms of the time overhead required to build, customize, and learn the application. Even though basic reports and queries templates exist, additional reports must be written from scratch. The software pre-requisites for installing SCCM are also substantial and more cost efficient with an existing MSDN subscription.

Pros

Automation and reporting for compliance. All Windows Updates are delivered and staged in a controlled and predictable fashion at scale. Machines obey the rules and report back compliance. This makes it easy to only worry about a few systems that are not well behaved.
Same can be said of delivering applications, OS feature updates, and OS images. I can't imagine dealing with this many Windows systems without a tool like this.

Cons

To deal with things at scale everything works with delays and over a period of time. This can sometimes make creating and testing changes difficult as it can take time for this to all work. All work is in the background and log analyzers are needed to understand what a client is doing if it is not working.

Pros

System center has several sub-products to manage datacenters; like scom and sccm. Sccm is very practical tool to manage hyperv servers and virtual machines. Scom is used to automate jobs on servers.

Cons

some tasks on hyperv servers are unable to be complete on sccm.

Pros

It is a series of integrated solutions that are integrated into my life to simplify their complex and difficult management and to make them available from anywhere.

Cons

microsoft System Center is a little mixed interface

Pros

We primary utilize this for Imaging (Win7 and 10), Patch deployments, Win10 Upgrade, App packaging and deployments. We previously used CA and RES AM so I have a lot of experience with these platforms.
1) Happy with the overall performance. Once SCCM is fully setup, it more a matter of maintenance.
2) App Packaging and deployment works well. Especially if you combine with the MS Powershell add-in. It does lack a few features Id really like to see. Some of these can also be found by finding useful 3rd party add-ins.
3) Reporting can be very thorough. The canned reports cover all the basics Ive needed. If you really want to dig in you can make your own reports.
4) Patching is straightforward. Since this is a MS product to MS OS there are no compatibility issues. Plus the SCUP product also from MS is still viable for 3rd party security updates from companies like Adobe. Comes in handy to deploy the latest Flash as an update, with the rest of the monthly updates.

Cons

My main complaint is SCCM is slow. This is well known and unlikely to ever change.
For example,

MY second compliant is there are certain features and hooks that still are not in the product over its many years of life. For example you simply cannot stop or delete a job from the [deployment] list. You need to trace back to the app group, patch group, and/or collection, then find and delete the deployment.

Lastly, I do have to say Im not fond of MS Cust Service on this. We have had some big issues and the resolution was slow to get to. Example, a situation where the Win10 Upgrades feature was broken, eventually there was a general bulletin, and their own Tech Support failed to notify us of this before that. Took 6 weeks to resolve.

Pros

Software deployments as it makes it much easier to do so to thousands of machines.

Cons

Must be installed on machine. We do not have Azure set up yet so we are only able to use installed SCCM currently.

Pros

Great for protecting your network, and a really great tool for sniffing around your network. You can see programs installed, updates applied, and even connect/remote control for a user in need. The suite is pretty easy to use and has never failed me so far with all the PC's I have to maintain. It saves you time, money and can prevent serious issues arising in a network. Once a virus gets in, game over!

Cons

I find the program is a big of a resource drain, however you can fix this by changing the priority to a lower setting to use less CPU power. Only other issue I have ever had was having issues with Internet Explorer, seems this program and IE likes to fight from time to time. Otherwise, no real issues. I do find it used a lot of hard drive space, but that isn't a big deal these days.

Pros

Applications can be packaged and pushed out to computers easily by creating packages.

Cons

it is complex and needs skills, so training your teams is important.

Pros

I have personally used the System Center Essentials/System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage our Hyper-V cluster, its a great tool, and in many ways superior to VMWare.

Cons

It is not as advanced as VMWare, although every update it gets a little better. It is however a great tool for a great cost.

Pros

System Center gives me the ability to remotely manage software, compliance policies, and operating systems on all of our windows devices. I spend 60% of my day in System Center managing the 5000 windows devices in our organization. I primarily use it to deploy windows updates, and operating systems.

Cons

I wish the logging and error messages were more "user friendly". I'm not a huge fan of "log files" so using this software and not having useful logs and helpful error messages is very frustrating.

Pros

System center configuration manager can use deploy Software,Windos patches level,inventry the Hard ware,software,remote conectivity..best secure software fo the IT infranstures

Cons

Actually SCCM define the manage Computer hardware software level.we can deploy all windows patch level,software level,Operating system upgrade,power management also.

Pros

It is full featured and tracks all of the ticket types we want to

Cons

Complex, not well documented

Pros

Microsoft have collaborated a good set of software. Allowing management of multiple systems within the system center group of software. It is easy to use and manage.

Cons

If problems arise troubleshooting can be a problem. There are a lot of logs to look through, and in experience, MS support is required

Pros

Largely good integration between the various products of the suite. Good integration with Microsoft's cloud offerings through the various products within the suite

Cons

Some functionality is very complex, some areas of the product are not consistent across the suite.

Pros

Microsoft System Center is a platform for datacenter management. I have worked with several companies using this resource. It streamlines processes to save both time and money. It is a great tool.

Cons

Unfortunately, this software can be expensive and therefore cumbersome to even a medium sized business.

Pros

Love the amount of features and control you have with System Center. Has functionality to fully manage a full windows enterprise

Cons

Takes a long time to set up. Can be difficult to troubleshoot. Can be expensive and pricing can be confusing.

Pros

System Center provide many options for configuring your clients. It uses AD to view any PC on the network, and manage them. The reports that it can provide are very detailed and easy to access. You can do almost anything to your endpoints with this product.

Cons

It is very expensive to implement, and does take much time and training to learn to use. There are a lot of errors that are not detailed clearly and sometimes the admin tools are hard to access.

Pros

If you have to manage a large number of computers on network, this is an indispensable tool. It provides a consistent & robust method to deploy new computers, install software, and manage security patches.

Cons

This software requires a serious commitment. It is complicated to setup and administer.

Pros

The software characteristics that make System Center very effective are: Powerful, Dynamic, Eloborate

Cons

The software characteristics that make System Center less effective are: Complex, High ramp up time

Pros

I like the visual icons, it makes it easy to find what I am looking for

Cons

I don't like the default settings. For example, the apps they choose to pin to start are ones I don't typically use. It would be nice if they could default by most used, rather than making me change the settings

Pros

System Center (now MECM) allows us to have machine compliance, and to keep our machines up to date

Cons

System Center (now MECM) is a complete product, training will be required in order to master the product and deployment

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to System Center

Pros

It is a great management and monitoring tool that provides an opportunity to optimize IT assets. It provides different subscription plans, from small businesses, mid-market, to enterprise-level options.

Cons

I did not find anything bad about this software, however, there is no free trial available.

Pros

The System Center Suite contains all the tools and software you need to run an IT department. You can either deploy only the products you need or deploy everything and link them all to work for you.

Cons

Some of the suite products does take some time to get deployed and tweaked for your environment.

Pros

We use System Center primarily for two tasks. The first is deploying new laptops. We use a captured image and automatically deploy a clean Windows 10 install, a driver package from Dell for that specific model of machine (detected by the task sequence), Windows Updates, and applications.

Our second major task is deploying Windows and software updates to all of our laptops and servers. This is by far the biggest time-saving feature. We went this route for end users as opposed to just using WSUS because it allows you to very flexibly configure the times/days that updates will be installed for end users. So we have ours configured to never force users to restart during the day to avoid interrupting our users at critical times. And for our servers, we just run a series of OS-specific deployment rules, and we're done. Everything else is handled automatically from there after the initial setup of groups.

Cons

It can be a lot of work to execute simple tasks. For instance, if you just wanted to run a single command on all your computers, you would need to create a package (which requires quite a bit of configuration), create a deployment group, and deploy that package. It would be nice if Microsoft provided simple solutions for more lightweight tasks.

Pros

One of the best network management system which help my organization to grow and manage the network problem. There are lots of built-in reports to monitor. Great security features and easy to define roles. Top of the cherry is remote control and management. If you are able to learn UI then it is very easy to manage all products.

Cons

There are some glitches while remote support. It is not a cheap one, products are expensive as compare to competitors. Bit slow as well in performance.

Pros

It is much easier and simpler to gather and manage the entire structure under one roof. In particular, the merging and bringing together of different locations and the management of the organization of all these processes on a single screen with almost zero resource usage. It is very easy to monitor and manage all processes instantly and within seconds. Moreover, different platforms do not prevent you from using this structure.

Cons

Installation processes take some time. This should not be perceived as a minus. If you have a mixed structure and organization, it is a necessary condition. Physical resource consumption is also a bit high.

Pros

One of the reasons why I tend use Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manage (SCCM) at ProfitSword is the ability to track network inventory, application installation and deploying updates and security patches across all of our Organization. what i like about SCCM is that it gives me the ability to take over our Microsoft SQL servers to implement security patches, and updates to our QA environment servers so we can quickly apply updates to our BI software and deploy the updates to production. Next best feature of system center is the ability to integrate with other Microsoft products to give us a fast and flexible updates to our servers at all times.

Cons

One of the downside of SCCM is the average cost to run and maintain SCCM, which is usually not sold as bundle within Microsoft product, but it is a larger separate suite from Microsoft and it is primarily expensive since it is not a Enterprise product.

I hope Microsoft to create an enterprise version of SCCM .

Pros

System Center gives us the ability to consistently deploy and manage both servers and workstations, as well as continuously monitor key indicators for executive reporting, like patch compliance, software deployment and inventory information, supporting risk and cost management decisions and empowering project teams to have a wealth of information about the environment at hand.

Cons

System Center is very much a suite of components and adoption, as well as operational running, requires expertise, however this is a small price to pay for the capability of its integration of functionality and the data/useful information it provides.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to System Center

Pros

Since I'm reviewing "Microsoft System Center" as a whole, and not one individual product, I will say that all of the products offer an amazing amount of tasks that can be accomplished! Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) allows for all types of alerts to be setup on both Servers and Network equipment, alerts such as "low disk space" on a server can be a real life saver, as well as a time saver. Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) makes imaging computers, pushing out software, managing windows updates, etc. a breeze. The product is very robust and offers a ton of different options. All of the products in the entire suite are laid out very similarly, so if you learn the layout / capabilities of one, you'll start to understand the others.

Cons

The biggest complaint I can make about the entire suite is that the learning curve is quite steep. I've been a Systems Administrator for a few years, and it has taken approximately 2 years to really get to a comfortable level with the products. There is tons of documentation out there, and odds are, if there is something you are trying to do, someone else has done it, and written a guide for it, the problem is that sometimes Microsoft's preferred approach isn't always the most easy, or doesn't always make the most sense.

Pros

I love how easy this product is to use. It is very intuitive and doesn't require any unnecessary steps to create a beautiful working operating system image.

Cons

I wish there were more new features being added with the new versions. There is a very active and very large UserVoice out there for this app and it seems like their team only works on 1 or 2 at a time and there are HUNDREDS of requests out there for changes/adds/etc/

Pros

It's a great product and using it's full potential no doubt it´s a great Investment. I love the software delivery. Operative System deployment and software inventory. Super powerful and it worth the investment.

Cons

One thing I specially don't like and I believe that is the reason why most of the companies buy this, it's how the software inventory is handled. When you scan a computer and set the scan to be repeated every day, obviously you need an exact number of equipment at any time. But when you change the name of a computer, you see two instead of one. There should be a better way to recycle computers without missing information.

Pros

We use this tool for managing our desktop computing environment as well as our ITSM ticket tracking. It is all there and is powerful.

Cons

The interface is circa 1999. It really needs to be moved to a web interface and streamlined. It is slow and clunky and as a result the team often feels lost. Unfortunately this leads them to be gun shy - with good right. We want them to have the confidence in making a change before committing something potentially to the entire environment.

Pros

The features of System Center are comprehensive. Remote support, remote management, asset tracking, software deployment, compliance monitoring and alerts, security enforcement, comprehensive reporting. The list goes on.. if you in anyway support an enterprise environment with thousands of deployed devices, System Center is the primary tool you should be using.

Cons

There's been a host of bugs that caused some issues with remote support among other things. However, Microsoft is very good about correcting and patching issues quickly once they're aware of them.

Pros

The integration between windows and a hyper-v infrastructure that can scale the compute, storage and networking by using Microsoft technologies and not third party which reduces the overall licensing costs from other vendors like VMWare or Nutanix.

Cons

The powershell module to automate builds and management lacks features and needs fixes and better error checking. There are no popular modules to pick from the Powershell gallery so you have to install it from their ISO and it is very challenging to move the module to another machine for remote management.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

SCCM has the ability to do infinitely more than I use it for. This software can deploy software, updates, system configurations. It has the ability to be expanded using extensions/add ins made by third parties as well as Microsoft which only make the software more powerful.

Cons

The direct support from Microsoft is almost zero. But, there is a huge number of people in the online community that provide support and are good resources.

Pros

Asset management, CRM, incident management, application deployment and those are just the features we use. Excellent, detailed reporting of incidents, users, assets, etc. Integration with everything Microsoft. The desktop apps are actually pretty decent, if you have used other Microsoft apps and are already used to how they are laid out. It really is better than some CRM tools and asset management tools.

Cons

Slow. Maybe it is just us and our on-prem setup (another con, these days) but boy is it slow. We were even told by Microsoft that it just is slow. That's it. Other MDM, asset management, CRM tools come with manufacturer setup teams to help you get started, we just threw ours together from scratch and a few classes. Everything is a learning experience and almost nothing is intuitive. Writing C# and XML are a must. SCCM/SCSM is not user friendly and takes 1, 2, or 3 full-time employees to run, let alone get setup.

Pros

Ease of intergration. System Center integrates well with Windows Domains.

Cons

Hardware requirements. System Center is resource intensive and some products do not provide a good return on investment in terms of resources versus tasks automated / simplified.

Pros

System Center Service Manager + Configuration Manager + Orchestrator enables full end user self service and automation, whist building a rich CMDB.

Cons

Can be a little tricky to configure System Center Service Manager, and the built in Microsoft Portal is not very user friendly, however can be made better with Third Party products.

Pros

The software suite is all encompassing. From managing hypervisors down to client PC's. The scalability of the software to make managing 1000 computers feel like 100.

Cons

The software isn't cheap. The licensing is pretty complicated too. There can be a sheep learning curve for some of the products.

Pros

At SCCM, I particularly recommend the ease of resource management and application deployment. If you are working with a large number of clients, you will need to switch to a centralized management system such as SCCM at a certain stage.

Cons

Personally, I can't find anything negative to write about SCCM. It responds to all our requests.

Pros

It's very complex and provide a solution for almost everything you need, so regardless your needs System Center can help you to reach your goals.

Cons

The cost is one of the most common obstacles at the moment you request a software that belongs to System Center.

Pros

System Center allows you to manage your IT infrastructure based both on-premise and in Azure. You can manage virtual machines (both VMWare and Hyper-V), public and private clouds, control configuration, update and monitor your environment.

Cons

Some tools, like SCCM, can be a bit complex when you start working with these. Documentation is huge and it can be hard to find required information for non-experienced users

Pros

Microsoft System Center has become a key resource for our organization's IT Department. It is the primary tool we use to make software available to end-users, it is the only way we doing imaging for all of our organization's computers, and it does have a lot of features that we have yet to take advantage of.

Cons

The only real cons we have with this software is primarily aesthetic changes are extremely limited on how we can customize the software center and application catalog that the end-users see. I would almost go as far as to say there is hardly anything you can change about the way it looks to the end-users. Overall, everything that is a business necessity is already integrated into this software, but it would be nice if we could change the look and make it appear a little more user friendly.

Pros

We manage a lot of servers available. very easy to watch each by System Center without requiring a server rdp.

Cons

bugs that are fixed on the server sometimes fades late System Center panel.Panels very simple, can be more visual.