Systems Management

Check to see if the jobs in Altiris do anything outside of what the installer does. The installers should be portable but Altiris is kinda like Zenworks where the agent can do other tasks outside of what the installer is setup to do.

I would be interested to know what the reason was from switching? Better interop with AD or other MS products? I'm not a huge fan of either but I have more experience with SMS. I have heard some good things about Altiris though.

Interop? I wouldn't put it this way... We've had MS patches repeatedly breaking SMS Proxy Management Points. Up until SP2 for SMS2003, security groups were not picking up properly out of AD (that's a major component of the AD infrastructure). Over the past year, I spent more time administering SMS itself than utilizing it for client administration. I wish we went Altiris at my current company...

That's sad to hear. I haven't been doing much SMS lately but when I ran 1.2 and 2.0 extensively it always seemed like the SMS team never tested their product against the latest patches coming out for the OS. When we escalated issues to Microsoft it was always a game of ensuring us that they would get on top of it and pointing fingers at different groups. Maybe one day they will learn from their numerous failures but reliability always has been an issue with SMS from day one.