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But expect to pay a pretty penny for it.

The application does more than remote control system, it can also do inventory scans of software and hardware.

Beyond that you got me...

Landesk is one such solution.. Unless of course you need something to monitor software installed on non-Windows machines...

Don't believe me? IRQ conflicts make Ghost run slow on computers (2004), and believe you me that this is still a problem on Dell Optiplex 745s in 2007 and 2008!

Especially those with a list of apps, mashups or what ever the buzzword is today on top of that without links. Make your own decisions. BTW I only count 8.
There is also the printable version
- FileWave
- NetOctopus
- LANrev
- Radmind
- ManageSoft
- LANDesk
- Timbuktu
- NTRsupport

We were in the same boat a few years ago and went with Landesk. It has fully configurable patching of both Microsoft vulnerabilities, as well as dozens of other packages such as Firefox and Adobe. They take care of the core of our software patches and updates, and the rest are easily done with some custom packages. It runs about $60 per machine per year. You can't pay a minimum wage intern to manually patch machines for that little money. It also does full inventories including serial numbers for Windows, Linux, and Apple machines.

I've used SMS from Microsoft, and it works great for Microsoft stuff, OK for other deployments, but didn't deal with Apple or Linux at all.

I have a colleague that has worked with Altiris, and he liked it, but it was a bit more expensive per machine.

All in all, Landesk works very well for us and has saved us countless man-hours and effort to keep our network running.

No i didn't RTFA, but one of my biggest concerns has always been remote central management in the enterprise structure. IT can't always make "house calls" to each and every computer, there has to be ways of remotely accessing, configuring and maintaining the systems and I haven't seen much that supports OSX. Even with Linux there are tools that allow you to do that, and most all central configuration tools are Windows based.

Goal 1 - To be able to understand the path of a process without perusing in and out of a lot of functions. - The BPM tool should contain a graphical drag and drop representation of your process. Additionally, if the tool can represent a complex yet constant business function as a high level action step that would hide the underlying details to.

Goal 2 - To be able to report on how long each step in each process takes. - The BPM product should have this report and other reports that help you engineer your processes further.

Goal 3 - To be able to see exactly where in the process software errors occur and be able to skip over failed steps so that we can come back and fix them later. - The BPM product should have a validation function before ever executing the workflow. The tool should also have some sort of error handling feature that either enforces business policies set at a higher level or allows you to configure the exception handling in the process design.

Goal 4 - To be able to integrate with our issue tracking system, billing system, and CRM software. We definitely will have to write some webservices here. - Maybe or maybe not, since Web Services and other integration techniques have evolved many products come with some sort of integration API. The BPM tool should have a way of integrating with external applications. That could be through Web Services, direct database calls, external processes, or direct code invokation.

Goal 5 - To be able to give process managers in different departments the ability to tweak certain processes without giving them full access to all processes. - To do this the BPM product not only needs to be able to enforce security at a workflow level, but your process designs need to be developed strategically into compartments so that a particular line of business manager can see his/her process without editing a piece that others maybe be using elsewhere.

I recommend the workflow tool LANDesk Process Manager by LANDesk Software.

It's a simple rule to get your "discovery" hyped. Take an old, established technology (in this case, software agents) and tie it to a media-friendly term ("worms").

This is not new. Distributed software agents are tried and true. We're using one, and it's working out rather well. Of course, there are countless shell scripts and such that provide similar utility. Ours happens to be able to propagate at our command.

I work at a large public university doing IT, and we use LANDesk Management Suite to do all our package management, OS patching, inventory, OS Deployment (imaging), and much more! The application is really great for people who like to get under-the-hood, because its package builder is robust and high configurable, and it supports scripting at multiple levels, can integrate with AD or run without it entirely (we ran it on our NT4 domain infrastructure for years), and the best part is if you have feature requests the company listens. They're a firm where you call up their tech support guy with a problem and he says "Yea, we've got a guy here who's been working on the problem, I'll send you the beta of our fix and you can try it out". They're smart people, and I like that.
We've gotten to the point where we can walk up to a machine, reboot it, PXE boot to Landesk's client, select an image from a menu, and the machine images itself, joins the domain, sets its static IP, reinstalls the Landesk client, patches the OS, updates applications, and reboots without us touching it again!
Version 8.5 even does Spyware detection and removal!
Highly recommended.

That's LANDesk Management Suite 8:

http://www.landesk.com/products/product.php?pid=11

For once, we have a concrete example to point to when citing the merits of P2P.

Let me offer a few others that have been around for a while:
- Distributing FLOSS. For example, Linux.
- Distributing music with the copyright holder's permission. For example, eTree.
- Distributing internally developed software to employees in a large enterprise. For example, LANDesk and Marimba use peer to peer distribution.