Poor application-distribution technologies are guaranteed to drive your workstation total cost of ownership through the roof. That's why both of these packages devote a significant amount of energy to providing solid, feature-rich tools for distributing applications throughout your enterprise. Whether you have a single site with 10,000 workstations or 10,000 sites connected via slow WAN links, these packages have you covered.

Through IntelliMirror you set within AD group policies that control application distribution. ZfD3 goes a step further by storing application objects in the directory; metering distribution and usage; and associating applications with individual users, groups of users or organizational units within the directory. Administrators use application objects to define all the particulars about an application, including the distribution point, INI settings, registry entries, the list of files to be distributed and additional settings, such as availability scheduling, fault tolerance and load-balancing.

A significant amount of administrative work is typically represented by one application object, but the good news is that that object's existence is protected by a distributed replicated database -- that is, your directory service.

Remote Management

ZfD3 includes remote control for the Windows family of operating systems, as do SMS, LANDesk and a number of other workstation-management packages. IntelliMirror doesn't include this feature. The difference between ZfD3's implementation of remote control and other vendors' implementations is that security is tied to both a user's identity within the directory and a Workstation Remote Management policy that is also directory based.

ZfD3 couples sane security features with a robust remote-management feature list that includes remote power-up, remote reboot, point-to-point chat, file transfer, remote execute, remote control and client diagnostics. This package of features makes it likely that your help-center personnel will spend more time at their phones and less time wearing out their shoe leather traveling from workstation to workstation. You save money and your users get better service -- that's a win-win situation.

User-level remote-control security features enable administrators to designate who can take remote control of a specific workstation. Further, the remote-control policy can be set to specify that the remote controllee is prompted via a pop-up message to grant access to the remote controller, with information about who the controller is based on his or her authentication to the directory.

Policy Management

ZfD3 and IntelliMirror offer sophisticated workstation-management policies that are based on who the users are, the user group with which they're affiliated and the workstations on which they're working. In the lab we were able to block access to various aspects of a typical user's desktop, such as the control panel, the run command, the command prompt and even the local hard drive. We also set different policies for different groups -- less restrictive for power users, more restrictive for regular users. We set policies to distribute different applications to different users and groups, and we set policies to distribute applications to specific workstations no matter which user was behind the keyboard.

Novell's ZfD3 wizards (screen view) Click here to enlarge

The idea is that you use these policies to safeguard workstations and maximize their availability. Your directory-based policies define and enforce your corporate desktop configurations while providing a high degree of customizability within a single point of administration. You'll use remote control and diagnostics when your users have problems and, when all else fails, use workstation imaging to get the system back up and running with a minimum of muss and fuss. As long as users are storing application data on a network device that benefits from a regular backup schedule, and their user profiles are stored in a similar fashion, the remaining information on each individual hard drive is easily replicated via existing images and policies.

Clearly, policies are the key to implementing your corporate computer-usage policies. These directory-enabled packages store policies in the same directories that contain user and workstation objects. Directory-enabled workstation management is an administrator's dream that pays big dividends to your bottom line.

IntelliMirror, free with Windows 2000 and Active Directory. Available: Now. Microsoft Corp., (800) 426-9400, (425) 882-8080. www.microsoft.com/

Windows2000/server/ZENWorks for Desktops 3.2, $59 per client. Available: Now. Novell, (800) 453-1267. www.novell.com/products/zenworks/desktops/

Ron Anderson is a senior technology editor of Network Computing. Before joining the staff, he managed IT in various capacities at Syracuse University and for the Veteran's Administration. Send your comments on this article to him at randerson@nwc.com.