Microsoft: Third Time’s the Charm?

Sometimes Microsoft needs at least three trips to the plate to bang out a solid hit. The first two versions of its Systems Management Server (SMS) prompted a litany of gripes, including that the software was bulky and its reporting features were inaccurate.

With SMS 2003, customers say, Microsoft has finally delivered a first-class package for managing Windows desktops—although the product wasn’t officially released until October 2003, about two years later than first promised.

Marathon Oil was so stymied by SMS 2.0 that last year it jumped at the chance to check out an early version of the next release. “We had a lot of issues with the 2.0 client software being kind of flaky,” says Michael Niehaus, who until recently was a technology consultant at the Houston oil company, which is using SMS to manage about 11,000 desktop PCs.

One big problem Marathon encountered with SMS 2.0: It was extraordinarily slow. The system would take between two and four hours to install a software package because the SMS servers had to scan through the company’s 1,800 applications one at a time. “SMS 2.0 was never, ever considered a fast software package,” Niehaus says. And it was a network hog, eating up to 10% of Marathon’s network capacity.

In SMS 2003, Microsoft redesigned the Windows-based software agent, dubbed the Advanced Client, which Niehaus says is much more reliable. SMS 2003, he says, also produces less than 1% of the network traffic that the 2.0 agent did.

The Advanced Client uses Microsoft’s Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS), based on code developed for WindowsUpdate.com, which delivers operating- system updates. Using BITS, PCs automatically adjust the download rate according to connection speed. By contrast, using SMS 2.0 to distribute software over slow network links is “like trying to pull a boat with a Volkswagen,” says Brian Steele, workstations manager at Citgo, an oil refining and gas company based in Tulsa, Okla. “It would never work.”

Another plus: SMS 2003 is much less complicated. “There’s a learning curve with SMS 2.0 that has definitely been reduced with SMS 2003,” says Michael Schorr, a network analyst at Ace Hardware.