If you can customize WinPE and write the scripts, you can just as easily use any imaging solution with SCCM R3.

Though it wasn’t true when this was written, it is today: ZENworks is dead. Novell killed it. They came too soon with a major overhaul replacing a stable, sturdy platform with a flaky, painful behemoth.

Despite it’s faults, SCCM is clearly the future for schools as the former Novell goes the way of Lantastic, Token Ring, and Travan tapes.

We’ve had limited success with a combination of Group Policy Preferences, folder redirections, and Access Based Enumeration providing a limited corollary to NAL.

I don’t know of any reason why both agents wouldn’t be functional installed on the same machine. The clients don’t share any ports that would cause a conflict that I’m aware of.

I can’t imagine the performance of a machine running both agents would be stellar. Further, since SCCM and ZCM offer substantial feature overlap, I don’t know why you’d want both management platforms in your environment.

The short answer is, “Yes, probably.” I wouldn’t recommend it.

jlc

Thanks

The ability to extend ZCM imaging with Ghost Enterprise substantially increases the cost of ZCM. The comparison becomes invalid once you license the Symantec product.

WSUS costs nothing. For ongoing ZCM patch management there is a recurring annual fee. While the benefits of ZCM patch management might outweigh WSUS, the fact that it has a hidden annual cost tips the scale to SCCM.

The overall point of the presentation is this: ZCM is not ZDM version.next. It is not an upgrade, it is a major migration. Organizations committed to Novell WILL be able to survive the pain of migration, accept the long list of new limitations that accompany the short of improvements, and enjoy the ZCM platform.

If the comparison were ZDM7 vs. SCCM, ZENworks is the hands-down winner. In System Center, Microsoft has stepped up with a full featured platform at the same time Novell took a major step backwards with ZCM. Novell’s timing couldn’t have been worse.

As more and more schools adopt the Microsoft platform, ZENworks no longer provides the same foothold to maintain a Novell presence.

Reliance on the opensource community for drivers for new hardware overrides all of the other points of comparison.

I assume you’ve seen ZCM now comes with Adminstudio Standard edition, not the stripped down version anymore.

On imaging, are you aware that ZCM can also work with winpe and ghost?

And, what makes the WSUS so great that it beats the pants off patchlink? With ZCM you’ve got the integrated patch management, to me this beats the pants out of WSUS.