SMS 2003 Application Deployment Datasheet
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On This Page
 | Simplified, Reliable Software Deployment |
| Enterprise-Level Planning Tool |
| Easy and Controlled Deployment |
| Cost Reducing Technologies |
| Rich Deployment Verification |
Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 provides a comprehensive solution for addressing and resolving an organization's change and configuration needs, enabling customers to deliver critical business productivity applications to users reliably and easily, in the right place and at the right time.
Large-scale system and application implementation projects are becoming more difficult and costly to undertake, but at the same time, the inability to quickly provide the right services to the right users could place an enterprise at a competitive disadvantage, potentially resulting in a negative impact on the success of the business.
SMS 2003 delivers the necessary tools to plan, test, analyze, and deploy complicated line-of-business and user productivity applications, allowing enterprises to provide critical business applications throughout the organization.
Simplified, Reliable Software Deployment
While new applications often offer valuable business capabilities, large-scale deployment projects have become less feasible given the difficulty and cost associated with such a project—resulting in potentially placing businesses at a competitive disadvantage. By providing a comprehensive solution for planning, testing, deploying, analyzing, and optimizing software applications, SMS 2003 delivers end-to-end capabilities to help enable the seamless deployment of the latest business productivity applications to every device—from server to handheld.
Enterprise-Level Planning Tool
When planning the deployment of new applications, enterprises need to know the status of their current hardware and software assets to ascertain compatibility and to understand the usage of these assets to reduce the overall cost of deployment. SMS 2003 delivers scalable hardware and software inventory with integrated Web-based reporting, enabling enterprises to make informed business decisions on new application deployments. These decisions can quickly be implemented by utilizing the asset information and stepping through the process in a test environment based on actual systems configurations. By grouping systems with the same configurations together, administrators can plan departmental rollouts effectively, greatly reducing overall costs.
Easy and Controlled Deployment
Moving from planning to deployment, SMS 2003 provides an easy process for targeted application deployment. Administrators can create collections based on certain inventory criteria, and then selectively target applications to these collections to ensure compatibility. If the applications need to be deployed to a certain subset of business users, SMS 2003 has the ability to utilize the Active Directory®-embedded business organizational information to provide departmental rollouts.
Cost Reducing Technologies
To help reduce the operational costs of preparing software for deployment, SMS 2003 utilizes the Windows Installer Service, allowing self-healing software packages to be created directly from a Windows Installer (.msi) file. The combination of SMS 2003 and the Windows Installer Service enables users' security levels to be maintained for regular activities, while applying and utilizing elevated rights to enable automatic deployment of software, maintaining a high security configuration at all times. SMS 2003 was designed to be bandwidth-aware throughout the application deployment process, preserving valuable network resources for business usage through a delta replication capability. Delta replication greatly reduces network traffic by only propagating changed or new files throughout the SMS 2003 hierarchy, allowing incremental changes to applications without consuming expensive network resources.
Rich Deployment Verification
By providing an end-to-end application deployment solution, SMS 2003 is able to deliver detailed customizable reports on the software deployment status throughout the deployment process. This allows IT departments to remain informed of the status at all times, and quickly respond to any deployment issues, should any occur.