[Casper] Casper v the others <Watchdog: Virus checked>

[James Partridge]

Hi Sean

On 18 Jun 2008, at 11:47, Sean.Calderbank at bauer.co.uk wrote:

> I have been asked to put a report together on the Pros and Cons of  
> Casper v Filewave, LANrev, RADmind and LANDesk. Has anyone done such  
> a thing? Rather than spend months doing this when we will almost  
> certainly go with Casper, I was wondering if I could get some ideas  
> from people who has already done this exercise in the Casper  
> community. Are there any resources on the Web that I can access on  
> this? Are there any tick box comparisons of what each product does  
> against the others?

There are several things I could say about this. The first is that  
after evaluating and testing several management suites we came down  
strongly in favour of Casper – so much so that we ended up giving JAMF  
a testimonial, as did our friends over in Cambridge (see <http://www.jamfsoftware.com/case_studies/ 
 > for these and more).

Our assessment was initially done from the point of view that we  
already had an established Altiris infrastructure in place for Windows  
management, and Altiris claimed to offer Mac management as well, so  
why should we get a separate solution. We also assessed other  
management software (e.g. LANDesk) that claimed cross-platform  
support. Very briefly, I ended up feeling strongly that the cross- 
platform management solutions were really Windows management products  
into which Mac management had been uncomfortably squeezed. Altiris was  
a case in point: although they claimed to support Macs, what I found  
was that the client they provided boiled down to a rather clumsy way  
to put Macs under Altiris "control", but without actually providing  
much useful functionality. Moreover, I had trouble finding anyone from  
Altiris who actually knew much about Macs, which wasn't a good sign.  
This, and other things like it, led me to the conclusion that it was  
more of a case of ticking the boxes ("yes, we support Macs / Linux")  
than actual management.

The contrast with Casper couldn't be greater. The Casper team are Mac  
sysadmins and Mac users. The product is designed from the ground up to  
tackle Mac-specific management issues – the kind of things that as Mac  
sysadmins we encounter all the time but that Windows sysadmins have no  
idea about. That was one of the things we liked from the outset:  
features that had clearly been added on the basis of experience, *not*  
because a product development team in a room decided they'd look good  
on a tick sheet on the company website. All you have to do is take a  
look at the Casper documentation and you'll see what I mean. It's page  
after page of "here's how you use Casper to deal with [insert problem]  
that you've been wracking your brains over for ever". I love it!

As Craig said, the JAMF team themselves are friendly, dedicated and  
professional. It's a real pleasure after dealing with so many faceless  
software companies to come across a group who are so interested in how  
you use their software, and so quick to help when you run into trouble.

Finally, my experience is that JAMF have a lot of goodwill within  
Apple, and the Casper Suite integrates well and plays nicely with  
Apple software. That's very important for us as we need to mix and  
match a bit depending on the specific environment we manage.

HTH.

Cheers

James


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
James Partridge
Systems Development & Support (Apple)
Oxford University Computing Service
13 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 6NN

Tel.: (01865) 273207
iChat: james.partridge at mac.com






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