Configurations are necessary to stay organized and secure. Big complications often stem from a small misconfiguration. With the increasing adaptation to a remote workforce, the need for organizations to keep their networks well-groomed is greater than ever. Configuration management is the process of governing and maintaining a network’s servers, hardware, and software in a consistent, organized way; it’s necessary for optimum network performance, compliance, and consistency. Poor configuration management negatively impacts the functionality of the network as well as opens doors for security incidents—sometimes expensive ones.
As stated by GlobalStats, 75.4% of the global population uses Windows machines. With this dominant usage of Windows, you can’t go far in endpoint management without Windows configuration management, which helps monitor and manage systems with Windows as their operating system, deploy Microsoft applications, and apply Windows updates.
What is Desktop Central?
Desktop Central is a unified endpoint management solution that helps in managing and securing your network’s endpoints from a single console. Manually identifying threats, non-compliance, and irregularities on each machine is undoubtedly a nightmare for a system administrator. Custom scripting was traditionally used to complete admin activities. However, in medium-sized to large networks, scripting can become complicated and lead to administrative overhead. With Desktop Central, you can automate configuration deployment and thus reduce the time, effort, and cost associated with configuration management. Since the work is automated with machine intelligence, there’s a smaller window for mistakes.
Configuration management with Desktop Central
Desktop Central facilitates configuration management with over 30 predefined configurations. The solution’s more than 8,000 predefined software templates are ready to deploy immediately. It also has over 100 ready-made custom script templates for tasks such as disk clean-up or modifying Control Panel settings. Desktop Central offers you the liberty to schedule deployment whenever is right for you. In environments with no “non-business hours,” you can schedule deployment during system startup or user login so the installation is done before employees begin their work. These configurations can be deployed to either a single computer or all the computers in a site, domain, or organizational unit.
Available configurations include:
- Security configurations, including those for USB settings, certificate distribution, firewall settings, security policies, displaying legal messages, permission management, and alerts.
- Desktop configurations, including those for setting paths, environment variables, display properties, legal notices, user management, group management, managing shortcuts, managing shared printers, and message box settings.
- Computer configurations, like ones for managing local users and groups, Wi-Fi settings, Windows services, drive mapping, scheduling applications, managing registry entries, installing or uninstalling software, power management, and executing custom scripts.
- Application configurations, like those for launching applications and configuring Windows applications, such as Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Office.
How is Desktop Central different than Microsoft SCCM?
Desktop Central does not have an extensive learning curve or require complete knowledge of SQL. It also has an easy setup and maintenance process, whereas SCCM’s setup and implementation is complex and requires users to have additional training. Even though Windows is primarily used, other operating systems are also prominent in work environments. And that is why administrators require a tool that will suit a heterogeneous environment, like Desktop Central. SCCM does not support Linux device management.
Desktop Central’s predefined configurations help administrators quickly manage Windows applications, OS settings, desktop settings, and security policies. Admins can choose targets at the user or computer level. Desktop Central supports patching of over 850 applications, including Windows, macOS, Linux, and third-party apps, for 360-degree security; SCCM provides very limited third-party patching. Several of Desktop Central’s features, like USB port security, agent rebranding, test group patching, software prohibition, audit history, and live chat support, are not available in SCCM.
Try Desktop Central’s free, fully functional, 30-day trial here.
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