I was asked recently which consoles are available for Small / Medium buisness, therefore I talked with my peers in the SMB space to pulse them for the info below.. here’s what they said..

Intel tools are designed only to demonstrate AMT functionality and do not include all of the features one would need to manage a network.

The 2 main SW packages for companies 200-1000 that have Intel vPro Technology built in are:

SyAM http://syamsoftware.com/main/index.php

Microsoft SCE: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/essentials/default.mspx?pr=blog

For over 1000:

LANDesk http://www.landesk.com/

Altiris http://www.altiris.com/

Microsoft SCCM http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/configurationmanager/en/us/default.aspx

So.. the next question is what do you do with the infrastructure that is less than 200? This is what I’m going after to figure out and post. Also to note is that we just finished building our first SCE server in my lab and we’re managing a few machines and it looks pretty good, of course I’ve yet to try automation & other tasks, currently just testing the OOB capability and the functionality for vPro. Nicole on my team is going to blog about this more. Things I wish I knew BEFORE I installed SCE (System Center Essentials) As for SyAM I saw this installed at an End Users site right before the summer and looked like a lot of the DTK functionality integrated in, however I’m still working to get it installed on a console to test/break, etc..

So.. next journey, finish out the use cases on the MS System Center Essentials console with Nicole and then start-up our SyAM testing with a 1/2 dozen boxes. If you want to see something specific or discuss a certain area please let us know as we dig deeper into SMB setup's.