Altiris Adds Mac OS Support To Client Management Suite

At its ManageFusion user conference in Las Vegas last week, Altiris announced that version 6.1 of its Client Management Suite will boast new Mac OS X tools.

New Mac-friendly Inventory and Software Delivery Solution components of Client Management Suite version 6.1 are rolling out now, and the entire suite should be available by the end of the second quarter, according to the company.

"The beauty of Altiris Client Management Suite is that we don't care if our customer uses it to manage Macintosh or Windows systems. We work to make cross-platform management seamless," said Mark Magee, director of product marketing and alliances at Altiris, Lindon, Utah.

Mac OS X management features include a refreshed agent architecture, improved inventory scanning, and new administrative tools that bring Mac clients under the Altiris management umbrella. Native Mac OS X support, a componentized agent architecture and a client-side task browser all ship standard with version 6.1.

Wade Wyant, program manager at ITS Communications, Grand Rapids, Mich., said the Mac OS support is a big plus. "Once you can do software delivery, you can do pretty much anything—remediation, patch management, you name it," he said.

And being able to do patch management on the Altiris platform will save time, Wyant added. "Even if a Mac patch comes out once every quarter, if you have 500 Macs, you don't want to do it by hand," he said.

Altiris has also added improved tools for Windows-based clients, including a drag-and-drop scripting system, improved software delivery and migration tools, language localization, and support for IP version 6, Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar, QuarkXPress, RIM BlackBerry and other applications.

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