Detailed Comparison – SC Essentials, SCCM, SCOM 2007

Looking for the best management solution for your enterprise? Confused between the different management software offerings?
System Center Suite Enterprise has a number of products to offer as IT Management solutions for large enterprises.

But..... here a a few important things to consider, so you can make the best choice:

  1. If your business employs 1–5 IT administrators who perform a broad range of tasks, then Essentials 2007 may be the best solution for you. If your company employs IT specialists (your IT administrators have distinct and separate IT roles like database administrator, or desktop administrator), you probably need the role-based security provided by Operations Manager 2007.

  2. If you frequently need to add new client machines to your IT environment, you may need full operating system deployment and desktop desired configuration features delivered by Configuration Manager 2007.

  3. If your company has more than 3–5 branch offices and/or the branches are large scale and complex in IT configuration, you should consider using Operations Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2007.

  4. If your company is a publicly owned company, then you can be held to certain IT standards like Sarbanes Oxley compliance, so you might require features offered by Operations Manager 2007 like audit collection services and data warehousing.

  5. Essentials 2007 is likely to be the best IT management solution for a majority of midsize businesses, so long as they are within the scale limits of 30 Windows Servers and 500 Windows Clients

Detailed comparison with System Center Operations Manager 2007
Monitoring

Operations Manager 2007

Essentials 2007 Essentials 2007 Difference
Monitoring of Windows servers, clients, hardware, software, and services Essentials ships with a network device management pack
Management packs with expert knowledge  
Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM)  
Add Monitoring Wizard  
Reporting Essentials data storage limited to 40 days. No report authoring.
Branch office monitoring Essentials 2007 is a single server solution; no tiered connection of servers.
Role-based security   Local or domain admin only for Essentials 2007 server.
Connector framework    
Audit collection services    
Web console    

 

Detailed comparison with System Center Configuration Manager 2007

Configuration

Configuration Manager 2007

Essentials 2007

Essentials 2007 Difference

Patch management (Microsoft and third party)  
Software distribution Essentials offers basic .MSI and .EXE deployment with optional command line parameters. No advanced packaging capability.
Hardware and software inventory Essentials collects 60+ fixed software and hardware attributes. Configuration Manager 2007 inventory is extensible.
Branch office updates and software distribution Essentials is a single server solution using BITS 2.0 (bandwidth aware). No site replication servers.
Operating system deployment    
Desired configuration management    
Wake on LAN    
Network Address Protection (NAP) integration

   

You can start by downloading the System Center Essentials 2007 SP1 Trial Software

Watch a demo to preview the features and capabilities of SCE 2007.

SC Essential 2010 Beta is here ! Know more…

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