SCCM overkill - alternatives?
Boys and girls,
I work as a sys admin at a school and i manage the Windows software for about 250 computers. Used to be more, but Apple has won the bet, so it seems. I used to do everything with SCCM: image deployment via PXE boot and the software deployment (mostly MSI's but sometimes silent installs). Now, our SCCM environment has crashed and the company that maintains our SCCM environment, charges us a big amount of money to rebuild the whole environment. What should have been an easy upgrade (to build 1810), turned out into disaster. They can't fix it, even after escalation the Microsoft's 3rd line. Now my manager doesn't want to pay this amount of money, so i'm looking for alternatives. It seems that SCCM is a bit overkill for what i need it for.
Are there any alternatives to SCCM? Basically what i need, is being able to deploy software (MSI's, silent installs with custom commands sometimes) to OSD's (device groups), and image deployment. Thanks so much!
Answers (3)
We use the Kace products in tandem We have the SMA, SDA and MDM for apple products all linked together. Do not know what SCCM is costing you but Kace cost is based on license count.
So they offer a upgrade, bust your SCCM system, and ask for more money to fix there f* up - those service providers are a bunch of muppets.
Anyway, this is free and will do the job https://www.pdq.com/products/
It wont do image deployment though, but you might get away with using MDT - which is now free!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Deployment_Toolkit
It use to be part of MDOP, which was part of a Enterprise Agreement £££
You can build a fresh SCCM environment and reimport the applications by hand.
You will need to to insert the applications in any other system again anyway.
This will take few hours for the initial setup, one day for the software updates setup.
You can then insert 5 applications per hour easily after this. So in a week you should get back on your feet with 200 applications.
