Comparing System Center Essentials 2007 and System Center Enterprise IT Management Products
Published: May 2, 2007
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Overview of Differences
System Center Essentials 2007
- Built for midsized businesses (50-500 PCs)
- Target user is IT generalist who performs broad range of IT tasks
- Scale limits: Manage up to 30 Windows Server and 500 Windows Client computers
- Single management server solution (limit one per domain)
- Easy to use – single console
- Lower entry price
System Center Operations Manager and Configuration Manager
- Enterprise class feature set
- Target user is IT specialist with dedicated admin roles (e.g., Desktop Admin, Exchange Admin, etc.)
- “Designed for Big” - scales up to Large Enterprise IT environment
- Multiple management server solution
- Formal compliance and reporting support
- Advanced features and configuration
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Business Considerations
Essentials 2007 is likely to be the best IT management solution for a majority of midsize businesses, so long as they are within the scale limits of 30 Windows Servers and 500 Windows Clients. However, determining the right IT management solution for your company may be determined by the maturity and complexity of your IT environment and business needs.
- If your company is a publicly owned company, then you can be held to certain IT standards like Sarbanes Oxley compliance, so you might require features offered by Operations Manager 2007 like Audit Collection Services and Data warehousing.
- If your business employs 1-5 IT administrators who perform a broad range of tasks, then Essentials 2007 may be the best solution for you. If your company employs IT specialists (your IT administrators have distinct and separate IT roles like database administrator, or desktop administrator), you probably need the role-based security provided by Operations Manager 2007.
- If you frequently need to add new Client machines to your IT environment, you may need full operating system deployment and desktop desired configuration features delivered by Configuration Manager 2007.
- If your company has more than 3-5 branch offices and/or the branches are large scale and complex in IT configuration, you should consider using Operations Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2007.
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Detailed comparison with System Center Operations Manager 2007
| Monitoring | OpsMgr 2007 | Essentials 2007 | Essentials 2007 difference |
Monitoring of Windows Servers, Clients, Hardware, Software & Services | • | • | Essentials ships with a Network device management pack. |
Management Packs with Expert Knowledge | • | • | |
| Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) | • | • | |
| Add Monitoring Wizard | • | • | |
| Reporting | • | • | Essentials data storage limited to 40 days. No report authoring. |
Branch office monitoring | • | • | Essentials 2007 is a single server solution; no tiered connection of servers. |
Role-based security | • | | Local or domain admin only for Essentials 2007 server. |
Connector Framework | • | | |
Audit Collection Services | • | | |
| Web console | • | | |
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Detailed comparison with System Center Configuration Manager 2007
| Configuration | ConfigMgr 2007 | Essentials 2007 | Essentials 2007 difference |
| Patch Mgmt (Microsoft & Third party) | • | • | |
| Software Distribution | • | • | Essentials offers basic .MSI and .EXE deployment with optional command line parameters. No advanced packaging capability. |
| Hardware and Software Inventory | • | • | Essentials collects 60+ fixed software and hardware attributes. Configuration Manager 2007 inventory is extensible. |
| Branch office updates and software distribution | • | • | Essentials is a single server solution using BITS 2.0 (bandwidth aware). No site replication servers. |
| Operating System Deployment | • | | |
| Desired Configuration management | • | | |
| Wake on LAN | • | | |
| Network Address Protection (NAP) integration | • | | |
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