Review: Sewing Up App Glitches

While bugs and glitches are certainly an annoyance, the real problem here is security. Many of the bugs uncovered in today's applications lead to security breaches. Thus, keeping software up to date has become a best practice for those concerned with creating and maintaining secure environments.

LANDesk Software has the answer to that dilemma in the form of LANDesk Patch Manager 8.7, a subscription-based software service that scans and remediates desktop and server systems. A big part of patch management is determining which ones are needed on any given system. Patch Manager handles that by scanning monitored systems and building an inventory of installed applications. What's more, the scanning process includes a vulnerability assessment, an important feature needed today to maintain and validate security.

Patch Manager was designed to be part of the complete LANDesk Management Suite, a grouping of products that offers soup-to-nuts control of corporate desktops and servers. That said, Patch Manager, which starts at $26 per node, can be installed and run as a stand-alone product, allowing VARs to start off with a patch management solution for their customers and then upsell to more advanced system-management capabilities as the need arises. In other words, VARs do not need to view patch management as a dead end when it comes to adding services.

Integrators will find everything they need to get started on the product CD, which not only includes the installation wizards, but also provides an abundance of documentation, which is a good thing, because the product can be quite complicated to install on an enterprise system.

Servers supported include Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. Most sites will choose to go with a server-based installation and then push the required components down to individual PCs via a script.

Integrators will find that there is a long list of prerequisites that must be met to install the product. Luckily, the installation process checks for those elements and recommends the appropriate action.

Once the server portion of the installation is completed, administrators can focus on the agent deployment to the PCs on the network. That process is eased by using the LANDesk Management console, which installs by default with Patch Manager.

The management console, which runs on a Web browser, offers several options for deploying agents across the enterprise and can be used to deploy additional agents if the customer purchases other LANDesk management products.

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