The Birds of a Feather session I attended yesterday evening on Enterpise Administration was helpful in listening mostly to others who are dealing with large network implementations and how they handle issues. I at least felt more stretched in trying to understand what they were discussing about much like I was the first 2 days of sessions I attended.
It appears that many use two clients for backup managent for their networks, a program called Legato and also Retrospect. Legato is a command line utility and therefore is scriptable and easily customizable. Retrospect is a server based cross-platform solution. The most popular use was to run Retrospect on a Windows server and use it for both Macs and PCs.
One VERY intriguing thing that was mentioned during the session was about Exchange 2007. If you are anticipating runing Exchange 2007 and you have Macs on your network that use Entourage for email access, then you MUST have a dedicated server for Free/Busy otherwise Entourage will have problems correctly display free/busy information.
I also found that Adobe CS2 has a command line installer for installing the suite quickly over a network. I am certainly going to be looking into this for use on our campus.
I inquired of the group as to what client/asset management solution(s) were being used. The two popular were Casper and LanDesk. Nessus, Radmind, LanRev, Sassafras, and FileWave were others that were mentioned. Radmind supposedly is extremely powerful and useful but has a pretty high learning curve, but once you get passed it is wonderful. Casper is supposedly powerful and easy to use and gives you a lot of control of your clients. The LanRev software is developed by a man who used to work on the NetOctopus project and has now started on his own. Supposedly from what everyone was saying, the NetOctopus project has gone downhill since he left. So his solution might be a very viable one. He has a booth in the Expo for award winning software.
It was also recommended to lean on Sassafras for this type of solution. Apprently the developers have the ability already to do this but they just don’t think they have the market to go forward with it. So if people begin to inquire about it perhaps they will pursue it.
