It's R E A L bad!

Assigned Engineers have limited knowledge and they seem to have no place to go to get answers. Developers fail to respond for weeks and when they do they respond by asking more questions. If they do EVER want to talk to you you have to wait until after 6 PM EST since they are still in their pajamas in the land "Down Under". Communications between internal Altiris support staff appears to be virtually non-existant. Forum threads are jam packed with customers who seem frustrated, fed up and angry. Altiris "Global Support" management team must be on a different globe! Direct emails to these folks go unanswered altogether. The average problem takes WEEKS to get resolved, if ever, and the customer MUST be the one to facilitate and keep hounding and pounding them constantly.

Other than that, no big deal!

A better blog thread should be a comparison of all vendor support in the Asset Management space. I'd like to know where to go when Altiris gets thrown overboard! It may be that everybodys support is bad. Or maybe a companies support is good but the product isn't comparable, function and feature wise.

Maybe a 1-10 score for Function and Feature and a 1-10 score for Support with 10's being the best. Published as a matrix, you could multiply each score and you get a buyability rating. The higher the rating number the better! Example: Product XYZ from ABC corp. has Great Features and Functions (10) and Fantastic Support (10). They get a buyability rating of 100!

Base on that method, Altiris might get a high score for Features/Functions and a low score for support (no negative numbers permitted). Lets say I give-em a 7 and a 1 respectively. That makes Altiris a 7 on the 1 to 100 scale. In other words, save your money and keep shopping.

We have Altiris NS 5.5 SP1 for 2 years, we are only using the Deployent Server and mostly due to how baddly the NS is documented and supported. Have you ever had an issue with PXE and try to have Altiris Help You, almost impossible, we had to FIX and find things out to make it happen.

We have Altiris, but I am almost begging our descision makers to move to SMS , at least there is knowledge of the product out there for supporty.

Well, I can now speak to this issue first hand! A little background first. We did a proof of concept dog and pony show for the company i consult for now, with SMS 2k3, Novadigm, and Altiris. We went with Altiris, even though it was NOT the best product, Novadigm was. Like i said, it was a dog and pony show, because 60% chose a product other than Altiris. We were promised things that I felt were not possible, I said so, but it fell on deaf ears. So, 1 year later we are 9 months behind on the migration from sms2.0 to Altiris 6.0, because they can't deliver as promised. One perfect example I recently discovered was in regards to the Unix support, we were TOLD it would support all the versions we use at (name left out) the company. So I went back to the altiris developers who told me "but wait we support those versions, but you will have to use NS5.x and buy that as well". I recommended to the company that they NOT BUY this module since it would only be supported on 1/3 of our Unix environment, they begrudgently agreed, and asked for more information. So, to sum up for now, not only is the suppport bad, the sales people are very good at selling a product with blatent lies, mis representations and an inability to deliver on most if not all of their sales pitches.

Their support is some of the worst that I have ever worked with. Fortunately the user community is great and there are a decent amount of us that know the products pretty well. I have all but given up trying to contact tech support to solve any problems. If a problem needs to get escalated above the first line tech support (which it almost always does) it gets lost somewhere in the abyss.

I think they have a decent product, but I do cringe when I start running into major problems. On the other hand, it has made me become pretty proficient in the different Altiris products :). Bottom line, Altiris needs to make a huge investment in the support area or I'm afraid they will start driving current and future customers away.

I had trouble last winter where my Notification Server stopped getting updates from clients. I tried several option: forums, email, calling tech support, bought a 5 incident support pack, but no one could help me with my problem. Plus, the forum admins and people I talked to on the phone were either extremely rude, new nothing about the product, or both. I finally after 5 weeks figured out the problem my self. 2 months later I get emails and calls asking if my problem had been fixed. 90 minutes is too long to be down, let alone the 90 days I would have had to wait for them to come up with some help!

Altiris support is not worth buying nor is it worth waiting for. They have a habit of waiting on problems until time passes and then asking if the problem was resolved. We switched from Altiris to LANDesk just because of Altiris terrible support. Although LANDesk is not as feature rich as Altiris is, we feel comfortable with calling LANDesk support and getting an immediate response or solution.

Altiris support isn't great (on the forums or the phone), but my assigned engineer seems to get me all of the answers I need in a very timely manor. The user community support is some of the best that I've seen, it actually prompted me to start altirisadmin.com to provide a better forum architecture for support.

Jeremy Smith
Dallas, TX
altirisadmin@gmail.com

I give it a D-.

1. The way the product function does not follow typical norms. For example, while in your NS, click the "Configuration Tab", Server Settings, Notfication Server Infrastructure, then Active Directory Import and remove any of the "Default Rules". Wait 15-20 seconds and you'll notice that they pop right back up. Now I know that they don't have to be enabled, but this is a good example of how Altiris could simply have made a "Cannot remove a default rule" error message or, ohhh I don't know, PERMIT YOU TO DELETE IT!?!

2. 1st and 2nd level support is the worse I have ever worked with. The reason for such a knock is that not only do they not understand the software they are payed to, but they even go as far as to supply INCORRECT answers. Now with all of us working in IT, we know that its always better to say "I'll have to look into that for you" rather that spout out some bs just to get someone off your back. Horrible... just horrible.

3. Lack of technical documentation. This, above all others, cannot be excused. Take one of your developers, (the one that can talk to a lamen pretty well), put him in an office and tell him to get a writin'!! Your developers rock... use them. Unfortunately, you never get to speak with a developer... although I did get to speak with someone "right below them" once. ;-)

If better whitepapers are released, this will lower the number of calls placed to technical support and free their time up to get better acquainted with the system. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that I would much rather sit down with a good whitepaper than having to resort to call a technical support team.

-jakoma

Oh, please you big bunch of IT crybabies... whoa is me, these computers are so darn dificult... Wake up and smell the coffee, boys and girls. Networking is complicated and everybody's network has its own unique combinations of hardware, software and organizational politics to make it even more convoluted to manage than it already is. Altiris is the best bang for the IT buck out there and gives you more ways to get it done, period. Can you use it out of the box without reading the manuals? Hell, no. This is a big toolbox and there is a learning curve, get over it. Dig in, sometimes the answers come later rather than sooner... If anyone needs some help, give me a call.

Yeah, certainly someone I want to do business with.