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	Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Discuss this article Flame the author     In this article Introduction BindView Development Corp. bv-Control 7.2 and Policy Operations Center 4.2 Configuresoft Enterprise Configuration Manager 4.0 with Security Update Manager 2.0 Pedestal Software SecurityExpressions 3.0 Symantec Enterprise Security Manager 5.5 PoliVec Security Policy Automation Suite (Builder 2.6, Scanner 3.5, Enforcer 1.1) NetIQ VigilEnt Security Manager 4.0 Computer Associates eTrust Policy Compliance 7.4 How We Tested Report Card

Configuresoft has some useful and unique features, but a big drawback is its Windows-centric focus. Sure, Windows has won the desktop, but as we all know, there's a whole lot of Unix and yes, NetWare, deployed. Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) provides the base functionality for device discovery, management and reporting, while Security Update Manager (SUM), which is licensed separately, provides patch reporting and updating. ECM is a powerful monitoring tool. That power comes at a price, though--the system is difficult to learn--but if you're an all Windows shop, ECM and SUM combined is a strong choice.

Unique to the products tested, SUM provides detailed patch and service-pack discovery and can deploy patches (though not service packs) to end systems. More important, SUM will display any dependencies that must be satisfied prior to the deployment of patches, such as a service-pack level. We ran SUM against our test computers and discovered many missing patches. We selected all the machines that needed patching and deployed everything in one fell swoop. SUM downloaded the patches from Microsoft's site and installed each one successfully.

ECM runs data collection through DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) agents on target hosts and dumps collected data back to a database. All report generation is run against the database, not live on the hosts, so make very sure your database is current before running reports. Luckily, ECM can collect subsets of data as needed. Further, careful hardware planning is needed for the database: In our 100 host test bed, Configuresoft recommended a SQL server with dual PIII CPUs, 2 GB of RAM, RAID 3 and a 27-GB database partition. That's beefy.