Hello and welcome to another episode of webinformant.tv my name is David Strum. Today we are on a quest to seek out an inventory all the desktops across our enterprise. Our goal is try to bring each desktop up to the latest versions of applications that they’ve installed. To do this, we use a series of software tools from Semantics ultraist vision called Client management suite or CMS.

Here you see its main page. Patching and updating all your desktop applications is critical. As you can see from this report from The Sans Institute that was published in September of 09, so how can Semantics CMS help? Here you see the summary of the machines that are on our test network.

Let’s go out and discover what’s running on these machines. Semantics CMS has several different ways of doing this including querying without installing any agents to get the basic info. We go to actions inventory, choose the agent less inventory and go through these set of screens. And we can see in this view here, just a few basic pieces of data have been discovered in this machine but wait, just because it has a bare bones picture of the unmatched clients. There’s a lot more to investigate, we can automatically deploy the ultimate agent across all the clients on our network and we can get more detailed information on this machine as well as perform more management tasks.

Once we have agents installed, we can automatically run a full software inventory by going into the manage policy screen and select in what we want to collect. Let’s see what we’ve got, there are lots of reports available under this menu tree and I’m just going to show you two.

On our sample network, there is a real museum of ancient software on these machines, including Microsoft office 2000 and Firefox version one. As the Sans report said, having these old apps is a real security risk, we want to update them with a more recent application.

So lets do some upgrades, the nice part here is that these can be done automatically without an IT person having to manually install software in each PC. We go to the actions, software, managed software delivery and begin the wizard that you see here to get the upgrade going.

Once that’s done, we can see there are systems that have been automatically upgraded to the latest version of Firefox 3.5 without any user or IT department manual action. This can be a big time saver.

Another time saver is another feature that I want to mention and that’s the integrated PC anywhere remote control. This is just another powerful means of supporting desktop users. We can right click on any of the computer and go to remote manage and now bring up a series of screens so that you can see in a few mouse clicks, you are now in control of a particular desktop that’s giving us problems.

While these features are impressive, it’s a very complex product. Semantics CMS isn’t some web 202 that you can pick up and install in a few minutes. For people new to this genre, getting everything working correctly is complex and requires coordination of various departments, skills, as well as a deep understanding involved in software components.

An example of its complexity is the composition of the ulterious desktop agent. As you can see, when we switch over to one of client PC the ancient contains a series of sub agents that can handle different tasks that need to operate and sync with the management server.

There is a lot more to CMS that I have time to cover in this video and have a second video that goes into more detail on some of the newer features edit in version seven.

Please go to webinformant.tv and watch that if you are interested. This is David Strum. Feel free to send email comments to David@Stum.com and thanks for watching.