JAMF Casper Suite vs. Microsoft's CM2012 w/ SP1

[Thurgood]

I am working to bring the Casper Suite solution into our Active directory environment. However the final hurdle I seem to be facing is with SCCM manager. He is saying that now Microsoft is offering several of the items Casper does and we are already paying for it. What I would like to have is more defense as to why we should still go with the Casper Suite. In his eyes the only true benefit he sees is deployments. Please provide me ALL strong defenses regarding using the Casper Suite vs Microsoft's CM2012 w/ SP1 (which was just recently released).

[chris_kemp]

You mean aside from expecting the same level of support for Microsoft's main competitor, vs. support from a company that is built around that product?

:facepalm:

OK, more specifically: Can CM2012 directly manage all aspects of the users' workstations, like account and password issues? Can you use it to connect to Macs ala Remote Desktop?
Can it manage iOS devices, and provide a personal "App Store" for your company's needs?
Can it report on (and install) available Software Updates?
Can it provide users on-demand installation of software & other files without needing admin rights? (In a good way, that is, not a malware-way... ;-) )
Can it show you current Warranty Status & purchasing information, straight from Apple's servers?

Casper can. :-)

[mm2270]

I don't know the full details of what Microsoft claims SCCM can do, but we have an SCCM installation here for Windows and, despite having a fully entrenched Casper management framework in place, our SCCM team began to drop hints that maybe we want to phase out Casper in favor of going with SCCM 2012?
One of the things I discussed with them was the use of Casper's FileVault 2 escrow key management. As we are moving in the direction of FV2 for all 10.8 managed Macs, this was one thing SCCM couldn't do in relation to Casper. I trust there are many places where SCCM can't stand up to Casper, but so much of it is semantics and bullet points on a spec sheet. Just because Microsoft says they can do A, B or C, doesn't mean they do it right.
My response to that is always along the lines of, 'yeah, just like LANDesk or Altiris can effectively manage Macs, right? Oh, right...'

Bottom line is, do you want to trust your Mac management to a company that has historically short shrifted the Mac platform and usually comes up with some non standard way of implementing a feature, or a company that has a long history of fully understanding and supporting Macs in the enterprise and uses standard built-in technology to manage Mac clients.
JAMF is also always within a few days of supporting any new OS releases, if not sometimes the day of release. Good luck getting an SCCM update to support 10.9 when that comes out. I suspect you'll be waiting a bit on that, and of course your CEO/CTO/bigwig will want to get upgraded to it right away or else purchase a new Mac that only runs on that OS.

I hope some of that helps, and I hope others chime in with their thoughts. I hate to see the obviously better product lose to something that only half works, just because of the "we already have it" argument. Best of breed man, best of breed.

[rtrouton]

Another point is "How long did it take for SCCM to support Macs? How fast is SCCM able to respond to Apple's major OS releases?" In the case of Casper, they were ready for Lion within a very short period of time. For Mountain Lion, Casper was ready on the day of the release.

I don't know how often your shop buys new machines, but if MS can't spin up support for new Apple OS releases quickly, that means either a) you've got unmanaged machines out in your environment, b) you have to stop buying new machines or c) you need to try to stockpile machines in advance.

[Brad_G]

Funny this comes up. We were just about to roll out a plan to have a central Casper service instead of the dispersed installation we have now. The managers above in the central IT department put us on hold and told us to look at SCCM 2012.

Granted, this was a couple of months ago and it was beta. A few highlights that you might relay back to the SCCM proponents.

There is no OSD. So while you can deploy packages it won't do a full OS like Casper Imaging.

No SUS. Ask your Windows admins to work without those two pieces and see what they say. I know what ours would.

While most of us here are technical people and we're not afraid of a terminal window, we often rely on other staff to help support our users. All of the client installation was command line driven with switches. During my testing I wrote a script to help automate the tasks. Nothing worse than fumble fingering something when you're trying to hurry things along.

Now take all your DMGs, PKGs, and re-wrap them in order to deploy. I love that I can take a PKG and drop it in Casper and go. SCCM you have to convert it. No Composer tool to do snapshots. No easy way to slip in a custom .plist file to customize your install. And yes, this tool was all command line driven too.

You have to enroll your Mac and it shows up in the Configuration Manager Console like an iOS device. I never did figure out why my installation might take hours or days before my Mac would talk to SCCM. It also showed two devices (assume one was the AD object and the second was the enrollment). It would report success during the client install and enrollment processes. But my management settings were a mystery when we'd see them. Then when a package did get installed it wouldn't do it in the background (login window). So as soon as a user logged in it would prompt them to do the installation. Not ideal for sure.

No GPO type of functionality. So what we do with login hooks, managed preferences, or profiles isn't provided.

While I could "find ways" to hack many of these things using alternate tools to fill the shortcomings of SCCM, it would take unnecessary work. Isn't that why we pay JAMF for the Casper Suite, to give us all these tools designed to work together seamlessly?

[Brad_G]

Oh yeah, in the sparse documentation that I could find there was only support for 10.6 and 10.7.

How long has 10.8 been out? New hardware support would likely be a nightmare.

[Thurgood]

Great feedback from all of you keep it coming. The more I get from all of you experts, the more I have to use when selling Casper Suite to upper management. They are watching costs and with Microsoft now offering their "generic" solution as part of another it just makes it to where I have to have a very strong sell. So the more that I can point out showing what we will gain from Casper Suite that CM2012 w/ SP1 can't do or do efficiently.

[imperatives]

I am evaluating SCCM 2012 SP1 specifically for endpoint protection and I must admit that Microsoft has done a great job with their mac endpoint client. Unfortunetly easily managing the mac client with SCCM is another story. It seems evident from my initial testing that SCCM 2012 SP1 is not a comprehensive mac management solution, but the System Center Suite is certainly moving in the right direction. Symantec is also on the verge of releasing a major update to Altiris that will provide fairly comprehensive OSX and iOS management. That being said, I don't think that the lastest SCCM release is by any means a feasible replacement for the Casper Suite. There are far too many limitations and unknowns.

[jarednichols]

All I have to say is:

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAA......HAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAA

You're kidding, right?

[CasperSally]

@imperatives - I'm an Altiris customer for our PCs, and I wouldn't get your hopes up about a major update. 7.5 had a firm release date of early Dec (after being promised earlier) which is now pushed back to Spring because of bugs found in testing. Altiris support is an absolute nightmare as well.

I agree these other 'all around' solutions will never get close to what JAMF offers in terms of service and product. If you need to be able to manage a lot of Macs, in my mind Casper is the only product that can do it well.

Let's not forget, though, the cost at renewal for that service from JAMF isn't cheap, but you get what you pay for. When you manage a lot of Macs with Casper - that annual bill can be a tough pill to swallow for management.

If you don't have a lot of Macs, I could see using DS/SCCM and other free solutions and getting by.

[JPDyson]

I don't usually go so far as to make an absolute statement about a management approach; after all, it's your environment, so you can do whatever you want (hopefully after contemplating the ifs).

That being said, fight this tooth and nail as though your life depended on it. It's a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad idea. Unless the lifestyle of Sisyphus for some reason appeals to you, this will not make anyone happy. Dismissing the lack of current generation support (!!!) the process for distributing apps or managing settings or delivering software updates will give you nightmares. Kiss powerful simplicity goodbye. Prepare for mind-numbing, obtuse complexity.

Best. Of. Breed. Casper is cheap. Therapy is expensive.

[JPDyson]

By the way, go ahead and give your SCCM manager access to your db via the plug-in. Chances are that information will make him happy. His customers (likely business-aligned) will love the single pane of glass, but you still get best-of-breed management behind the scenes.

[dpertschi]

So it looks like many of us are in the same boat, needing to defend the obvious (to us) superior product. I am too!

To satisfy the C-Level Suits; we need to generate some factual data from hands on experience and/or other reputable source, and collaborate to combine the results. I'll have access to a 2012SP1 lab install in a few weeks, and am planning to go beat on it.

Perhaps we could share our findings in a public resource like this one: http://tinyurl.com/c9nev94

We've all had to defend Mac solutions before, lets band together on this one! Who's in?

[stevewood]

@dpertschi - what an awesome resource! We are in a different boat. Our office in Denver is currently utilizing Absolute Manage for their Macs and they want to move to Casper. Unfortunately that is being placed on hold right now while some other things play out at a higher level. There is going to be a review of solutions and a decision made that could affect all offices in our "network", and this is exactly what I need to show that Casper is best of breed.

Thanks!

[mm2270]

@dperteschi - Nice chart there! I downloaded that one to keep on hand. Thanks!
Though of course it looks like it was built well before any announcement or release from Microsoft of the new SCCM. It'll be interesting to see that get updated at some point just to see a proper comparison.

@Brag_G - nice rundown of SCCM 2012. Lots of great points there. I will also keep your information handy, just in case that specter of SCCM replacing Casper here ever shows up again. Though as I said, as soon as I mentioned FileVault key escrow, it knocked the wind right out of any argument to go that route.

[ctangora]

Take a look at the requirements for setting up a Mac client on SCCM 2012. In fact, print it out. Then print out the similar content from JAMF's quick start (pages 9 - 11). Give each to your boss. Tell them you read both, ask him/her to discuss with you after they read both.

Microsoft's Way...
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj591553.aspx

Casper's Way (pages 9 - 11)...
http://www.jamfsoftware.com/libraries/pdf/products/documentation/Casper_Suite_8.6_QuickStart_Guide_for_Client_Management.pdf

And yes. SCCM 2012 SP1 only supports 10.6 and 10.7. So you won't be able to have any 10.8 machines.

[donmontalvo]

@CasperSally wrote:

Let's not forget, though, the cost at renewal for that service from JAMF isn't cheap, but you get what you pay for. When you manage a lot of Macs with Casper - that annual bill can be a tough pill to swallow for management.

ROI for JAMF annual support contract has always been an easy case for us, never had a problem getting buy-in.

[mpermann]

@donmontalvo, if @CasperSally is in the education sector like I am then I can understand why she said it's a tough pill for management to swallow. Many things are harder sells in education.

[clifhirtle]

I'm going to go out on a huge limb and assume SCCM-does-Macs will look a lot like Dell-KACE-does-Macs.

And as original author of that eval matrix Darrin linked above (with some amazing contributions from others in the community) I am well aware of how you can prove that these do-it-all, promise-it-all suites really don't look too shiny bright once you do the math and compare apples to apples. Frankly, based on what I've seen in the last several years (and documented in that matrix), I'd be far more likely to recommend Absolute Manage or Filewave for a commercial, cross-platform systems management suite.

PS: as an echo of my shameless plug off MacEnterprise this AM, I'll be presenting on that same comparison matrix at MacIT Conf in a couple weeks, with a break out session specifically aimed at connecting those experienced with XYZ solution with those just getting started or curious about it. Look for the tongue-in-cheek reference to our jobs in Mac IT as "herding kittens."

Clif

[jarednichols]

@donmontalvo, if @CasperSally is in the education sector like I am then I can understand why she said it's a tough pill for management to swallow. Many things are harder sells in education.

Given my last stint in EDU, I can verify that JAMF's EDU discount borders on "how are they making money off of me?"

[clifhirtle]

+1 to JAMF's crazy edu pricing. Like about 1/2 the cost of competing solutions.

[donmontalvo]

I helped Polo Ralph Lauren migrate a thousand or so Mac users from OS9 to OSX back in 2004. It was a huge project involving Apple/Microsoft engineers and lots of project hours. The Wintel guys were like "What, you can package and push and manage Macs?! --- No way!!!". :)

Their goal was to use Altirls for everything, and I went along for the ride since architecture design was outside of my SOW. I remember that the Altiris guy (who is still there to this day) made it easy for me to send him images and packages, but I also remember that two years went by and we never got the results that they expected.

Towards the end of my two year stint there I let them know we needed to buy a central management solution for Mac. At the time LanREV and Casper were competitors, and both provided a lot more than Altiris, but after a few months of waiting for a decision, I decided not to wait any longer and I the firm. Miles Leacy was hired a month or two later and he was successful in getting them to buy Casper. I've seen the same thing happen at other firms..."Use what we have" and eventually "Let's get best of breed so we can get things done." :)

[tkimpton]

Have to agree with Jared. Are you guys feeling ok? Maybe you need a lie down LOL

[mpermann]

@jarednichols and @clifhirtle, what your saying about the pricing may be true. But with my 20+ years in the education world I'm no longer surprised by what management perceives as a good value.

[jarednichols]

But with my 20+ years in the education world I'm no longer surprised by what management perceives as a good value.

When you reach the "Make it do everything we need, all the things we want and don't spend a dime" mentality in your management, it's time to move on.

[mm2270]

Agreed that JAMF's education pricing is extremely competitive compared to most other products, considering what you get.

However, it's important to remember that there is a difference between lower ed (public schools) and higher ed (colleges and institutions), the former often being devoid of funding for these kinds of things and the latter usually having more funds for this stuff. in short, whether its hard or easy to swing can greatly depend on what level of education you're in. Given this, I'm not surprised to hear some education customers here claim that management has a hard time with the renewal costs.

That said, JAMF does have great edu pricing. You definitely get some great bang for your buck. I've also seen JAMF "stretch" the definition of education in some instances to help customers obtain their product.

[mpermann]

@mm2270, yeah I have to agree with what you're saying. Nearly all my time has been spent in the lower ed arena. Sometimes just getting the money for computers is hard enough.

[clifhirtle]

@mm @mpremann I hear you but as we all know you add up the cost of having even a handful of sysadmins in repeated meetings over several months to negotiate a decision to fund a Jumpstart and you could have paid for that Jumpstart and then some. Time vs money: you're spending one or the other. Better to choose early than have it chosen for you over time.

[CasperSally]

We are K-12. I think the per device pricing is probably competitive, but when you have 6k+ OSX and 500+ MDM licenses, it's a big line item out of a K12 budget. Like everyone has said, there's no doubt we couldn't do what we do without JAMF and Casper Suite.

I know charging per device is the norm, but I do wonder if supporting a district like mine costs JAMF more than supporting a district with half the number of devices, who pay JAMF half the annual cost. I don't imagine I get better/quicker support than the district half the size, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it would make some sense if the price per device went down after X devices, but I guess if we're willing to pay full price, it makes sense they are going to continue to charge full price.

In any case, I'm thrilled JAMF is an option for us and hope it will continue to be for years to come (even with budgets shrinking), really happy with support and the product overall.