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CA IT Client Manager

The widespread proliferation of client devices has resulted in significant complexity in the way IT manages its assets. Bogged down by manual tasks associated with daily operational processes and the resolution of issues, IT often struggles to provide the high-quality, efficient services for devices that drive competitive value to the business.

A single, unified solution, CA IT Client Manager  ® provides fully automated features that help you streamline the processes of:

  • Maintaining and tracking hardware and software inventory
  • Managing updates and patches
  • Configuring and migrating machines
  • Providing security and support for remotes systems and devices

Benefits

CA IT Client Manager maximizes the efficiency and responsiveness of all client device management tasks, helping IT to improve the quality of its services — while reducing operational costs, mitigating risk and increasing end-user productivity throughout your enterprise.

The CA Advantage

An integrated, fully automated device management solution, CA IT Client Manager helps you minimize the operational tasks associated with the administration of the various devices within your IT department, eliminating the complexities of disparate point solutions and offering a vision for the strategic management of all IT client resources.

Drive Operational Efficiency Through Improved Client Management Processes

CA IT Client Manager (CA ITCM) helps you gain the confidence and control to deliver IT services under any condition by automating the operational processes needed to manage an enterprise-level client environment.

As a single, integrated management solution, CA ITCM provides you with full visibility into your entire IT asset base — including desktops, laptops, mobile devices, PDAs and more — and addresses client device challenges with comprehensive features for:

  • Asset inventory and discovery
  • Asset intelligence
  • Software delivery
  • Remote desktop control
  • Patch research and management
  • Desktop migration

Asset Inventory and Discovery

Utilizing such key functionality as automated discovery of hardware and software inventory, configuration management, software usage monitoring and extensive cross-platform reporting, CA ITCM provides you with a robust set of device tracking and identification capabilities that is critical for properly managing your infrastructure. As such, CA ITCM allows you to:

  • Discover new systems that enter the corporate network, automatically, using both traditional IP-based discovery and continuous, active discovery capabilities.
  • Generate a detailed hardware inventory that includes serial numbers, CPU information, total RAM, internal and peripheral disc drives, operating system versions, service packs and network and power settings.
  • Produce a detailed software inventory with a higher degree of granularity than that of traditional inventory scanning solutions.
  • Collect inventory data, without installing a dedicated management agent, by enabling users to provide information through such methods as visiting a corporate web site, clicking a link in an email message or using a USB memory stick.

Asset Intelligence

CA ITCM helps drive the strategic planning efforts of your IT executives by converting raw asset data into actionable intelligence they can leverage to make well-informed business decisions, reduce organizational risk, ensure greater policy compliance and identify opportunities for additional efficiencies and cost savings.

Right out of the box, CA ITCM provides a series of ready-made views that provide instant analysis on key factors in your environment, including:

  • High-level analytics that help you quickly identify risks in the environment and promote further investigation into asset deployment, performance metrics, service levels and financials.
  • Standardized displays that help you find dominant system configurations based on performance, hardware components and software, and compare them against other assets in the environment.
  • Financial information, such as software license compliance, expiring legal documents, procurement costs and new hardware deployments.
  • Asset information, including hardware and software details.
  • Service information showing service level agreements, risks and costs, which drives the understanding of a service activity’s current status, priority and root cause.

Software Delivery

With release-management features encompassing everything from the policy-based distribution of software, to the maintenance of system configurations and rollout across multiple platforms and locations, CA ITCM automates the installation and updating of software across all client devices in your heterogeneous business environment, helping you to:

  • Centralize the control and management of installing, reinstalling, configuring and uninstalling software across a full range of enterprise devices.
  • Create packages for homegrown or customized applications in Windows-centric Microsoft Installer (MSI) format, or standard RIF packages for UNIX, Linux and Mac operating systems.
  • Group software by business function, application, vendor or other categories for easy, standardized distribution by business and computer groups.
  • Deploy and redeploy new systems with a comprehensive approach to operating system installation management that spans everything from bare metal buildups to rebuilds after crashes.
  • Develop self-service installation capabilities that are centrally controlled and accessible through a web browser, allowing users to automatically install software on their own.

Remote Desktop Control

CA ITCM enables your IT administrators to reliably and securely access, control, view, manage and modify remote desktop and mobile systems. This allows end users to simultaneously exchange files, conduct interactive chat sessions, execute remote applications and monitor and record activities with greater efficiency and effectiveness — no matter how far they may be from the main office. Remote desktop control functionality allows you to:

  • Configure and maintain systems from a centralized management console.
  • Enforce policies through template-based remote control configurations that can be applied to groups of computers to prevent unauthorized changes.
  • Manage remote systems using features for exclusive control, shared control, stealth view, web viewer and classroom and stealth modes.
  • Transfer files, chat with the host user, record remote sessions for later playback or reboot the host system.
  • Ensure authenticity by aligning different security methods, encryptions and access permissions to specific user and connection types.

Patch Research and Management

To help you deliver consistent, reliable software patch management, CA ITCM addresses each step in the process — from monitoring and discovery through research, packaging, testing and deployment. And with around-the-clock support from CA’s Content Research Team, you gain the support needed to help ensure that your enterprise systems are always up-to-date with the most current and effective software patches. CA ITCM’s patch management features help you:

  • Leverage monitoring, validating, researching and publishing features that work together to identify new patches and make them automatically available.
  • Employ a simple, task-oriented user interface that combines with a web-based reporting portal to provide the controls and information needed to administer each step in the patch process.
  • Implement a formal patch testing phase that assesses patch packages — and metadata — against the required system configurations.
  • Initiate package deployments automatically, using defined policies, and apply pre- and postrequisites, dependencies and roll-up structures during installations.
  • Monitor all patches and packages to ensure they remain valid and in effect, and that new or crashed systems are automatically restored to the most up-to-date patch level.
  • Utilize monthly delta roll-ups of new patches to enable administrators to deploy a single patch package each month.

Desktop Migration

By providing automation that leads to greater control and improved execution of change initiatives, CA IT Client Manager enables you to preserve and transfer unique end-user settings, data and preferences during a system migration, hardware refresh, operating system upgrade, new installation or recovery process, and allows you to:

  • Save unique data and settings to a local machine or server for later migration, or transfer them in real time via a connection between the old and new PCs.
  • Leverage powerful features for account creation, redirection and security, as well as tools for migrating user profiles and transferring data from NT domains to Active Directory (AD).
  • Utilize advanced data collection capabilities to migrate comprehensive system and application settings.
  • Initiate migration processes from a centralized location that uses shared configuration resources, such as option files and templates, and issues return codes to trigger the next steps in the process.
  • Schedule the recurring storage of specific PC data and settings that collects only the changes that have taken place since the last time the file was saved.
  • Leverage automated deployment setup, director, template editor, explorer, option editor, studio and merger and acquisition tools to cut migration times.