Comments on: Managing desktops the Microsoft way

Software maker is moving beyond eating its own dog food. But some partners say company is grazing on their turf.

[fred dunn]

MS Has No Good Desktop Mgmt Software...

SMS may be half-decent at some things but patch management is not one of them. Sure it can do it with add-ons but with every patch cycle comes the question "Will SMS detect this patch?". It is a kludge at best with a heavy and highly misbehaving client.
When will they just buy Shavlik or another enterprise PM solution and get some REAL expertise in-house?
They also need some out of band support and native Wake On LAN support.
MS is the last company to go to for Managing desktops.

[ngehani]

Partners should get over it...

If partners are making money on the deficiency of the software, then partners need to think of something better to add value to their services. I have been in the Software business for a long time and when a company decides to cripple their software or make a decision not to improve it because of how it affects partner's services business, then I am not sympathetic. A lot of partners base their business model on exploiting the difficulty of a vendor's software. Case and point is Great Plains. It is a complicated beast and therefore partners think they can charge a lot of money for services to just make it easier but don't really improve anything. Microsoft should just embed the functionality and make the software easier. Similarly, this applies to managing desktops, networking, VPN set up, user management, etc. I hope Vista does improve things here so I can stop paying partners for what should have been in the software.

BTW, I am also a Microsoft Partner.

Neil

[fred dunn]

Amen to that...

Stated very well.

[Michael Grogan]

You're right

MS should embed the functionality and make their products easier to use. Problem is they need to learn how to do that first!

[M3 Sweatt]

Link to case study

Although the article doesn't include the link, you can find the case study here, on the Microsoft Customer Evidence Search Site: http://members.microsoft.com/customerevidence/search/EvidenceDetails.aspx?EvidenceID=14285&LanguageID=1&PFT=Microsoft%20Services&TaxID=26039