Extending SCCM to heterogenous environments

This was a session presented by Quest to talk about their products that can further enhance SCCM. It is designed to improve the ability of SCCM into non windows areas and help achieve a better ROI.
These are branded Quest Management Extensions (QMX) and contain the following functionality:

• Support for non Windows OS - Red Hat, Suse (server and desktop), OSX, ESX, HPUX via agents.
• Agentless (reduced functionality) for Novell, Ubuntu and network devices such as printers, switches, routers and mainframes.
• Can add non windows OS into Active Directory.
• Patch and software distribution to the above (1st bullet).

QMX for SCCM 2007 are the above except network devices, if that functionality is required you also need to purchase QMX for Device Manager.

Session Change

Next I was due to go to the Get IT Faster session, as soon as they got to the agenda I realised it was not relevant. The brief pitched it as enabling deployment and patch management, they key thing it missed off was using Dell's software for Dell Servers.

So I ducked out and went to the exhibition hall. i spent some time talking with Quest (Provision Networks division) which is all about their VDI solution and using it to make your corporation greener. They gave me a tshirt and if I wear it I can win a prize.

Yep, I wont be winning that prize!

I talked with some of the System Centre consultants and they confirmed that any existing MSI we have packaged for apps via Zenworks can be imported into SCCM no problem so that is good. They seemed iffy on whether OS builds for non-windows would be on the development path thought. This seemed surprising after Bob Muglia had pushed the products for managing a heterogeneous environment so much. I guess there is still a difference between managing your environment and creating it.

I noticed that some of the snacks provided were Mars ones and that this snickers had some alternative labelling:

I chatted to some of the Citrix guys to get an update on some things and got a nice sticker for my laptop from VMWare.