Product Reviews

In the world of network management, LANDesk Management Suite may have been around longer than most but it has always impressed. In its last visit to PC Pro, it received a Recommended award (see issue 82, p234). A lot has happened since then, though. LANDesk Software has cast off the Intel shackles and is now an independent company, plus the latest version 7 on review focuses more heavily on software deployment.

The new company has substantially revamped the product, as it now includes licence monitoring. This provides active monitoring, allowing you to enter the number of licences for specific applications, and LANDesk will block local access if running an app will exceed the licence count. This offers a number of similar features to Microsoft's System Management Server (see issue 82, p235), as you can specify how many concurrent uses are permitted and place users in a queue to await the next licence. Expiry dates may be entered for specific applications, and thresholds allow you to send out a warning message if licences are running low.

Installation is simple, and a new checklist utility makes sure all required Windows components are loaded first. LANDesk still requires all systems to be grouped into domains and controlled by a single core server, and it was surprising to see that, at the time of writing, Windows Server 2003 wasn't supported either

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as a management server, managed server or even as a client. Each system requires an agent to become part of the LANDesk domain and deployment has been streamlined, as these can be installed using a login script or pushed to multiple systems. Templates created on the core server determine which of the myriad components are to be installed to the target systems and the deployment can be run immediately or scheduled. Licence monitoring does require a separate agent, but this component may also be included in the installation template.

The main LANDesk component is now the Desktop Manager. The previously separate Server Manager utility has been integrated into the same interface, allowing you to swiftly view the health of selected servers. All available systems are displayed for selection and you can choose from a range of support tools including remote control, chat and file transfer. We criticised LANDesk for its poor inventory accuracy in our last review and it was disappointing to see little has been done to improve it since then. Hardware detail is comparatively basic and it was unable to identify the SCSI adaptors on any of the test systems, while software identification paled into insignificance alongside Systemhound (see p183). LANDesk does offer a change-identification tool, but with so little detail to work with it becomes redundant. Software deployment is a far stronger feature, however. LANDesk offers its own imaging tools, but also supports Microsoft Sysprep, PowerQuest Drive Image and Norton Ghost image files.

While some network-management tools have suffered from a lack of serious development, LANDesk Management Suite looks to have benefited since its move from Intel. The new company has already made significant improvements to the core product, with the licence metering the most notable addition. But one of its main strengths is software distribution, making this an ideal choice for managing wholesale OS migrations.