Oh, good afternoon. I'm John DeTroye, senior consulting engineer with Apple's education division. I'm the client management specialist. And this afternoon we're going to be talking about client management in the enterprise. How many of you were here last year for the... Fun and games we had. That big huge crowd of kittens up on stage talking about all their stuff.

We had a lot of fun last year. This year what we're going to do is we're going to narrow the focus a little bit. We're going to talk about systems lifecycle stuff, the tasks that are involved in that. We're going to talk a little bit about how the enterprise tools fit into that. I have-- we've picked some of the best of breed tools to talk about this year and how they fit into the lifecycle.

And we've got some customers here, which is what we really want to hear from, is how do these people use this stuff day to day? How do they live with this? So let's take a look at what we have to do in the lifecycle. What is a systems lifecycle? How many of you in here do IT on a regular basis? How many of you know how to spell IT? What we're going to talk about is the tasks that you have to do every single day. I mean, think about this.

This is the cyclical stuff that we live with all the time. The things that we have to deal with of evaluating, deploying, and managing all of our tools. Now, what are the tasks built within that? Here's the whole list. Asset management, imaging, software distribution, remote control, usage management, license management, patching and upgrading, and help desk management. That is our life.

Well, as we go through these, when we evaluate what we're going to do, we have to start off the beginning of the year or the beginning of our cycle, and we have to figure out what tasks we're going to do, how many of those are going to be in-house, how many of those are going to be outsourced. We have to figure out what software and hardware we're going to be using as we do this, how much manpower, how are we going to get through all these different tasks, how often.

We also have to deploy all of these tools using these tasks. How many system images am I going to build? How often am I going to be deploying these? Am I going to do manual deployment? Am I going to be out running around the entire state with FireWire drives, re-imaging all the computers in my area? Am I going to do network-based deployment, and what do I need to make that happen? How often am I going to go through refreshes on my systems, or am I going to do it as needed on an iterative basis? Management, the thing we do every single day. The idea there is, am I going to be doing centralized system management, or am I going to have people down at each site, department, school, whatever I'm working with doing this? License management, simple things.

Password changes. We always talk, well, we're going to centralize management, but then on the average day, how many people lose track of their password, and we have to react to that? And in certain environments, you may only have minutes to be able to get that password reset. How do we work with that? System software and security updates, hardware issues, third-party app issues, who's handling the help desk? You know, is that the, oh, today it's your turn, or do we actually have people, you know, designated as help desk operations? And the whole workflow management, asset management, and so forth, and the more important stuff at the end.

So we go through this. This is a regular day-to-day operation throughout the year. And if you think about it, every one of us has to do that. We sit down and review our current systems. We evaluate what our needs of our users are. We have to determine the hardware and software that's required. And from that, we build our image sets that we're going to use for deployment.

We cycle back and forth, different test configurations. Then we go ahead and we image and deploy the systems. We manage them. We do upgrades during the year. And all of a sudden, bang, we're back again at the evaluation stage, figuring out what we did right, what we did wrong, and where we need to go with it.

Some good examples, and this is a little pat on our back for Apple, is how we fit into the task management set. Just to give you a common base of definition for the different tasks and where the Apple tools fit in. For asset management, remote control, and help desk operations, we use Apple Remote Desktop. For imaging systems, we have NetInstall as part of the NetBoot technology, and we have the new ASR multicast that's part of Tiger. Yes, very cool. I thought I could just do an hour on that alone and we'd have fun, but, you know, no.

All right. Software distribution using ARD and NetInstall again. The usage management stuff, the Manage Client for X, all the MCX settings that are built into that, patching and upgrading, using ARD again and Net Install. One of those things where all those tasks fit. As an example, asset management from an Apple Remote Desktop point of view, being able to do the system-level reports, network reports, memory reports.

One of my favorite ones there is somebody calls you at 7.15 in the morning and says, how much RAM is in every Mac in the building? And you go, you know, and being able to get that kind of information quickly. For imaging, using the Net Install to be able to do basic Core OS installs, to be able to do the customized installs after the fact, to be able to do upgrade and patch installs and so forth.

For usage management, using Workgroup Manager and the Manage Client for OS X. Being able to do system-level management, being able to do system preference management, third-party preference management as part of the Tiger Preference Editor that we have now. And along with the mobile account and portable home directory support, which I will talk about in more detail tomorrow at, I think, 10.30 in the morning.

So let's talk about enterprise solutions. Key contributors to this from the commercial side, people that do this stuff every day, and like I said, we're going to talk about some best-of-breed solutions. What we've got is people from Sassafras here in the audience, and I'll talk about K2, their license management suite, FileWave and Asset Trustee, LandDesk with their management suite, and Alteris with their management suite. four key contributors to the enterprise IT side.

As an example, we walk back through these tasks again. Look at asset management. What does Sassafras do with this with K2? We can do complete inventories of all your Mac and Windows software. It doesn't matter whether you're managing it or not, just literally an inventory of all the software that's installed on the systems. To be able to do hardware audits and look for additional details about the OS and the computer profiles and additional items that you want to plug into your database. Being able to do incremental updates of that.

So what are the differentials that have happened over the last month or last week or last six months or whatever? K2 version 6.1 is coming down the road. It's going to include web-based reporting. It's going to include a Tiger widget for the managers to be able to look at reports.

And it's also going to enable RSS feeds for the web-based stuff so that you can see any changes that have happened. Plus the fact that it uses its own template internal report mechanism plus ODBC compliance. It's going to be able to use compliant report mechanisms for external reports. And the back end of this runs on both Mac OS X or Windows-based servers.

FileWave with Asset Trustee uses an agent that provides for automated gathering and storage of all the hardware and software information into its database. And the client software actually initiates the scans on the computers to provide the information back to the server database, and then it is Mac OS X server-based.

Landesk does a client-side scanner that is completely configurable so you determine what items you want to gather. And you can perform full hardware and software inventories. It'll also do incremental and delta scans of what the changes are over a period of time. And we can also add in additional database items to scan for other non-computer related items. Plus the ability to do completely customized inventory reporting. This system is Windows Server based on the back end.

For license management, K2 does complete control at whatever level you specify for the software license. So you can have unlimited site licenses, and you can apply that to an application, and then everybody that's allowed to use it will be allowed to use it. I can go in and node lock a license where this specific computer can launch this specific application, and that's the only one that's allowed to use it.

I can also set concurrent licenses where if I have 50 licenses to a computer and I install that software on 200 different systems, only 50 computers will be allowed to launch that software at a time, even though it's installed on all the computers. And plus, you can specify very, very distinct custom limits and restrictions to this. And also define multiple profiles for different sets of computers, depending upon how you want them to be used.

Being able to reclaim abandoned licenses would be if you have a computer that moves to a different department and the software isn't needed on that computer anymore, you can see that the license isn't in use on there, and you can actually regain that license and apply it to a different system.

And then plus a full set of license reporting and analysis. Landesk uses a passive agent to keep track of the software that's being launched on a computer, and to be able to work with the inventory scan to go back and say, what's been run on here? So we're managing licenses through the inventory.

And then we're managing licenses through the inventory mechanism, and to be also able to track the licenses and define what people are using, depending upon how you want to set for just an application or for the entire application suite. To be able to import specific files for that, and to be able to manage license reconciliation over downgrading the rights to a specific application for somebody, and to be able to apply the different rights policies that you want, depending upon what the user is going to be allowed to do.

And the console system being able to set off a warning is a really good thing, that when somebody's, when you violated the license, you know, it'd be really bad news to be sitting there with a manager looking over your shoulder, and all of a sudden you get an alert that says, hey, we got a hundred people using this 50 user licensed application. And having the console alert you that when you break license restrictions that it'll let, it'll give you a heads up on that.

For license management from Altares, they have a contract management solution that will actually track all the various license settings that you provide. So you can actually insert which license agreements apply to different sets, which warranties are provided. So in other words, getting an alert that, hey, I've got a license that's warrantied for X number of years, and here's when it's running out.

And to be able to specify this and build it into the integration or integrate it with the inventory solution so that we can see later on what's going on and get complete inventory of the status of all my licenses, of all my systems. And to be able to provide complete, and I love the term executive versus administrative reporting. Administrative reporting is what an IT manager wants. The executive reporting has all the funny colors to it. It's the difference between the cartoon report. You know, here, boss, go look at this. And the one that you need to do your job.

Pretty pictures. Patching and upgrading. One of those tasks that we have to do with, you know? I mean, despite the fact that we ship our software and it's perfect, There's always somebody that has to have a patch to it. So consequently, FileWave allows us to deal with that by having the patches or the updates that come down through the software update server. I can make them part of a load set and have them available to my clients. And I can do it automatically or I can make it part of a load set after I've gone through the testing process and set that up.

I can also execute the shell scripts, what we used to call payload-free packages. So now the shell script can be part of a load set instead or it can be part of the package install. And once again, the idea is that the client pulls this. So it's not a matter of saying, hey, is the client online or not? Once I've specified the load set, the client, when it comes up and connects to the network, will say, hey, I need this. And it will go and get the package.

Landesk will do patching and upgrading through its security and patch manager interface. And what that lets us do is either use their software distribution mechanism or the patch manager where the administrator will download the file and create the template for the update and then make that available along with whatever the definitions are going to be for security updates, the vulnerability definitions, and say under these conditions this is when the update will apply.

So, enough of me talking about this stuff. What I really want to do is we want to get the people that use this stuff every day up here. And what we've done is we've gathered in some customers that use this stuff every day and work with enterprise IT solutions. And I've got three people that volunteered their time, their effort, and we'll get them all into the beer bash tomorrow night. Mark Jeffries from Genentech, David Zubradt from ViacomMTV, and he promised Paula Abdul.

and Rick Yang from the Inner Public Group. I'm going to have them come up here one at a time and they're going to spend a few minutes telling you about how they deal with enterprise IT management and the solutions that they use to fit in. And we'll start with Mark. So let's bring Mark up on stage.

Good afternoon. Well, K2, of all these different little software management tools that we're talking about, Sassafras is closer to the Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky model of software tools, or the less is more sort of philosophy, if you will. There's too many hairy people in this audience. You didn't catch that bald joke. What's wrong with you people? No, seriously.

is diffusing things. Seriously, the cool thing about K2 is not so much what it does, but rather what it doesn't. Sassafras went with the approach of, "Yeah, we could do patch management. "Yes, we could do package management. "Yes, we could throw things on your desktop "and make dancing beauties appear and all this other stuff." We don't want to do that.

We'll just focus on these core things. And it really comes down to what is it that you, as an average IT-oid, would need to do in a given day when trying to figure out what do I have? How much RAM does it have? How big of a drive does it have? Of that size of a drive, how much space is on that drive? What operating system do I have? Which build of that operating system is on that given machine? Is that machine here? Is it somewhere on the network? Then we get to license management. It's not so much how many licenses you've got, but it's really how much are those licenses used? That's really the thing that those people within your organization who look for those beautiful multicolored charts, that's what they're looking for.

Because by finding out license usage, they can then go to their licensing people who put pressure on the vendors to make them give you the software at a decent price instead of going to the software store. And they're going to be able to get the software at a decent price instead of gouging you so they can make their trips out to Hawaii every year for the big sales conference.

That's the sort of data that they want. And that's the sort of stuff that, in my opinion, Sassafras K2 does a really good job with. Because you can, in a very simple UI, basically everything happens in one unified console where you can see the number of machines that have been called up through the system, the number of licenses that you're tracking and monitoring, and all the applications that have launched at one time or another on your network.

And that's the default mode with K2, where it will, as soon as, if you have a K2 client on your machine, be it Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, when a person fires an executable off, that sends a message back off to the main console of K2, which says, application blah, blah, blah has been launched on your network.

Now, before your end users start freaking out and saying, wait a minute, isn't this spyware? Are you monitoring my keystrokes? Do you want to know what downloads I've just made? Well, the reality of it is that K2 doesn't do any of that. It doesn't know that you just pulled something from hotukranianbabes.com.

It doesn't know that you're actually doing the PowerPoint presentation for your kid's pet show. All it knows is that you launched it. And that you used PowerPoint for approximately 3.4 hours. And you're part of a user group of 200 people that in the last week have all used PowerPoint for a minimum of 45 hours.

So then you can now pull this nice little cute report and hand it back off to your pointy-haired boss, who then says, cool, we know that even though we have 300 machines on our network, or 3,000 machines on our network, there's actually a lot of power points that we can use to do this.

So then you can now pull this nice little cute report and hand it back off to your pointy-haired boss, who then says, cool, we know that even though we have 300 machines on our network, there's actually only been 150 people who have used PowerPoint anything longer than five hours a day. You know, we might be able to manage that license a little bit better.

You can go from just a monitoring of how many people are using a license to actually engaging total fascist lockdown on a license and saying, okay, this has been tied to the node of MAC address 128.137.6.5. This application will no longer launch on any other machine other than 128.137.6.5.

So you can do those sort of things very lightly with Sassafras. And the other nice thing about it is it's built-in bandwidth throttling. So when it does an audit, whether you're on a PowerBook or a fully tricked out G5 or soon a MacTel box, It automatically throttles the amount of information it needs for the audit.

So you could be on a dial-up modem and it will not overtax the system. And if you are concerned about bandwidth on the console, you can tell it. I don't want you to hit this user any more than 60 kilobytes a second. Now, that means that your audit is going to be really slow, but eventually you'll get that information.

And the nice thing about it, the end user doesn't notice. The K2 client runs as root, so you can actually embed it down. And if you are running a managed Macintosh system where you lock root out so that you basically don't give end users the license to kill themselves, you can actually embed it down.

You can then pretty much make sure that the client sits there and sits there reliably, and you don't have to worry about it being accidentally shut off or somebody flipping controls on you unexpectedly. The server itself is also very lightweight. I mean, you could arguably run a large-site K2 server on an iMac. And I'm not talking like a nice G5 multi-fan, super cool, loose-site job. I'm talking about old-school, bondy blue.

With maybe a 30 gig hard drive on it and a healthy amount of RAM. Now, I strongly don't recommend that you do that and have about 3,000 clients hit it very hard, but it can be done. It doesn't take a lot of headroom to run a K2 server, and it runs quite happily. The console is accessible. You can be anywhere on your network, and you can call the console up.

For what it does, now, there's other applications, and we've actually used some of these others ourselves that you'll also hear from today, and they're real cool, and they work really great for the various things that they do. But when it comes down to very, very specific things you need to know, like how many licenses do you have, how often are they used, who is using those licenses by, you know, Unix ID... And what do their machines have that you can then quickly turn around and turn into a very nice report for not only your IT people, but also for your pointy-head bosses out there? K2 is a very, very nice package that does all this very cleanly and very quickly. The guys at SAS Press do an excellent job on customer service and follow-through and just making sure that the application stays very much up-to-date. Quite personally, I was very excited when I heard about them including dashboard widgets because the reporting widget is real slick.

Because then you don't even have to call the console. You just bring your widget up and say, and your boss comes over your shoulder and says, So where is that usage report in regards to the latest software product that we just got? You can quickly pull up your dashboard and say, "Oh, sure, boss, right here." And call it up and they're like, "That's most excellent.

You live for another day." So, all humor aside, we've been using K2 now since its inception back in 1995, and the product has just continued to grow and expand in its capabilities. But, once again, going back to that Donna Dubinsky, Jim Hawkins, Palm Pilot sort of metaphor, they kept it simple. And that's really a very attractive thing in this day and age of ever-growing complexity in just the tools that we use in our day-to-day work. So, I'd like to leave it off at that point. Thank you very much for your time.

Now David tells me that Paula isn't here, but David Zubradt's from ViacomMTV, and he's going to come up and tell you what those guys are doing, and you think that MTV just does music videos? No, they do IT. Now my presentation is going to be more of an overview of what MTV is about and our solution that we have chosen. And first of all, I'd like to thank John for asking me to speak. My hope is that your eyes aren't going to glaze over like my wife's do when I talk about my job.

And you'll see, hopefully, that I think we're probably in the same boat. If you're in enterprise IT, I think we kind of have the same problems, I'm guessing. Again, I am with MTV Networks, 1515 Broadway, Manhattan, New York, Times Square. More specifically, MTV Networks IS&T, which means we don't have the big flashy offices, we have the beige offices and the gopher farm and all that kind of stuff.

But MTV itself, MTV Networks itself is MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, Comedy Central, and our newest channel, Logo, which will be coming, hopefully, to your cable lineups. We provide central support and purchasing for all of MTV Networks. And of course, that means our challenges are that we have to provide quick service, tested and up-to-date software.

More challenges. We need to control our IS&T operations. As probably your case, it's probably the same thing. We don't make money for the enterprise. We suck money from the enterprise. Yeah. So we're always having to, you know, freeze our hiring while our customers, they keep adding, you know, Nickelodeon's going to add 100 more graphic artists over here. We're like, uh, but we have 10 people out of 1,000. So we're always worried about that. We're trying to control that.

And we're trying to find solutions so we don't have to go out there all the time to every desk and say, oh, Creative Suite 2 has come out. That's 4.4 gigabytes of information. I'm going to have to go out to this person's desk, this person's desk, and install. And we also need to keep track of what is installed, what is on our network.

We also need to respond to quick changes in our enterprise like virus updates. Hopefully we're moving that over to EPO. We're going to use the new Virex. So actually we won't have to worry about that much anymore, which is a big load off my shoulders. Network changes. I don't know. Our network people don't really like to talk to the Macintosh people that much. It might be like your enterprise. I'm not sure.

But they can't understand. These are the people that can't understand why an end user would have a one gigabyte EPS file that they're working on. And why 500 gigabytes of network space isn't enough for 100 graphic users. And it doesn't matter. We explain to it over and over again. It's the same thing every day. They're dealing with multiple gigabyte EPS files.

And we also things like Sarbanes-Oxley. Our company is really strict about detailing everything about Sarbanes-Oxley. Everything. We're detailing everything. And did I mention that we're detailing everything? 60-day password change, which also includes 60-day password change of our local admin accounts on all of the Mac OS Xs out there. Every 60 days. Every 60 days.

Okay, so our solution that we chose, and we chose them a long time ago, is FileWave. I've been working with FileWave since I started MTV in 2000, which was the old OS 9 version. We're now using only OS X. We've shut off OS 9 support. That way, people who are still hiding and hoarding their OS 9 units, like the Bondi iMacs and the blue and white G3s, will eventually call our help desk and say, I can't do anything, and I need help. So, again, we've chosen FileWave.

In our data center, we have four Xserves, four G4 Xserves with dual 133s, one gigabyte of RAM, and they're on our gigabit backbone. So we have four of them. Three of them are actually FileWave itself, FileWave proper. We have one as the main. The main server, two that are our logon servers, or they're called boosters now, that express software out to people. And then we have one Xserve that runs our asset management, which is called Asset Trustee with FileWave, which uses PHP and MySQL is back in now instead of 4D. Sorry, 4D. Thank God 4D is gone from our system.

Our user base right now, we have approximately 1,000 Macintosh computers at five different sites in New York City. We also have approximately 150 production boxes that we don't touch. They're not on our network, not allowed on our network. They stay off our network. We're not going to support them.

They don't like us to support them. They're very protective about it, and we like it that way. So it works out for both of us. We keep strict standards, strict minimums for our desktop users. Our current minimums right now, if you have a desktop dual G4 500, you can keep it.

We have 768 megs of RAM and 30 gig hard drive. That's going to be a secretary now using that system, whereas a few years ago that was, you know, it. Our laptops have to be G4s. They have to be. Again, 768 megs of RAM, 20 gigabyte hard drive. If you have that, you can have OS X on our network.

More about Macs in MTV Networks. They provide 95% of the content that you see on television. And we only make up 10% of the population, total computer population, in MTV Networks. Of course, we're still second-class citizens. They don't care. Of course, when the big virus went out on the PC side a couple years ago, all the Macs were still working.

And that did not fall on deaf ears when the CFO was asking about that. Because money was going down the tubes that day for their business units. Yeah, now the good, what I like to call the good, the bad, and the ugly about FileWave. The good, again, John has mentioned this before, it's a pull technology.

If a machine's not on the network at the time or is shut off, when it comes back on, it logs into the main repository, pulls down what they call a manifest, and says, oh, okay, here's what I need, or oh, this package is updated, and will pull it.

So if a laptop is home for three months, it comes back on the network, or they VPN in into our network, they'll get it. And luckily, our VPN is separated into broadband and dial-up. So only broadband users will get the updates. We won't update on 56K. Or 336. If you know anything about telephones in New York City, sometimes you're lucky to get 14.4 out of the old system that's out there.

We have a 99.9% success rate on everything we push. I'm not going to say 100%, though I do like 100%. I just think you wouldn't believe 100%, so I just dropped it down to 99.9. Our first push was Timbuk2 in the old OS 9, OS 8 days. We had 100% success on that, and it was instant.

We pushed it out with all the preferences that we wanted with admin account that we could log in, and our help desk was immediately able to start remote support for users. It was great. The bad, the packages we distribute are live. They're live, live, live. If you mess it up for one, you mess it up for everybody.

Sorry, Norbert. So we test it, test it, test it. I have a bank of lab machines that I test all my applications on before I push it out. Test, test, test. And again, one more test I think is adequate for that. Here's the ugly. The initial install is a desktop visit, or if you have a remote desktop opportunity. So it's easier if you have a remote desktop on the machines already.

And it's also easier if you already use the sharing name as the-- As the client ID, which of course we chose not to do. We chose a complicated one. So if you have more questions at the end of this, I'm happy to answer these for you. Thanks, John.

So next person coming up here, we're going to bring Rick Yang up here from Interpublic Group. And Rick has a rather unique opportunity to tell you how, in IT, how to herd cats. What do you do when you have lots and lots of different companies that you have to provide IT management for? So let's welcome Rick up here.

All right. My name is Rick. I work for Interpublic Group, and I'm responsible for setting hardware and software standards on the Macintosh platform. I'm going to give you a quick background of Interpublic, your understanding of why some of our challenges and how and why we use Lendesk. Interpublic Group of companies is comprised of 87 divisions of advertising, media, all kinds of marketing companies. All these 87 divisions own a lot more companies. We really, it's hundreds of companies and Interpublic is a holding company.

In our enterprise, we have about 45,000 computers, of which 15,000 to 20,000 are Macintosh. And once we fully deploy LANDESK, we can get a very accurate number of that. Round right now, we're not sure. And quick history on Airpublic is all these companies really operate very individually. None of them really collaborated. Every company's got its own IT department, its own CIO, the whole whole thing. Everybody does his own thing.

So about two years ago, we hired a consulting company to come in and, you know, go around every office, find out what everybody's using, the systems, the software, ask all the IT guys, what do you guys really do around here, that kind of stuff. And a lot of information came out. And one of the more shocking example is Interpublic uses about 400 different financial apps. And that was, I mean, it's always been a nightmare for a corporate to collect an output accurate financial data.

Around that time, what consulting company would do? Consolidate, centralize your IT. We're like, "Okay, let's do that." So two years ago, we formed a group called GIS, which stands for Global Information Services, within Interpublic. The goal is we have one organization to support all IT functions for all these companies as a whole.

We finally started to form the GIS companies and There's three main goals we want to accomplish, at least on the desktop side. We want to create hardware and software standards because pretty much at that time, anything under the sun was being used. Every company's got its own solutions. Every company's got -- using all kinds of vendors out there.

And another big problem was Every company is really doing their own thing, meaning everybody's researching, evaluating, implementing systems that pretty much does the same thing. So, standards is important. And the second thing we want to do, we want to create a central service desk to support all of the users, regardless which companies you're from.

So at that time, we created standards for our group. And standard was very important, as you'll see, for an organization like us, because it was not possible to operate if you don't have standards, precision policies, and desktops, and softwares. So-- We created a central service desk in New York.

And that service desk is level one support. By doing this, we freed up the field techs to do more deployments, to research other projects. And we have really great success with our central service desk right now in New York, and we have one in London to support our EMEA offices.

We are currently closing 40% of first call resolution, meaning 40% of tickets are being called. on a by user call-in, and it's done. Ticket closed. The system we're using for our service is Remedy, and we integrate that into LANDESQ. for using mainly the search that's using the remote control components of it.

And another major component of LANDESK we're using is the asset management part of it. Because before that, we really don't know what we got out there. I mean, because of so many offices we have, we have constantly closing of office, opening a new office, consolidating real estate. IT managers are constantly being asked for inventory of what you guys have.

Different managers have different ways. Some have better systems. Some are literally, "Okay, I'll go around and start collecting information." And by the time You got your, you know, information started coming in, somebody's asking for it again because it's probably not accurate already. So it was impossible until we can have something that can just set all the information in for us.

And we are also using software distribution and patch management components of LANDESQ. Now this is, it was really, it was extremely important for us to set hardware standards just to accomplish this part because you've got to imagine, If we didn't have a standard, patching and software is just going to be hard. By setting software standards, now we have a manageable set of software that we can deploy. By setting OS standards, now the patching is manageable. By having one antivirus is better because we were using probably anything you guys ever heard of among these companies.

And actually, we, on ARD, on Apple's remote desktop, we are still using that in conjunction with LANDESK because it is an extremely nice tool. Even though we have LANDESK on the enterprise side, our remote desktop was being used by the local admin because it does some things that is very easy and very fast, even though it could be accomplished in LANDESK.

Stuff like sending a UNIX command, just copy a file to someone's desktop. So, we still have use for ARD in our environment. And also, LANDESK also required a visit to the desktop first time for installing agent, and we use ARD for that, which is a great time saver.

And lastly, we are currently evaluating-- well, we have an active directory now that we're ready to pull all these companies in as our directory service. So we are currently evaluating extending our schema so we can further use Workroom Manager to manage MCX and all the preference, because control is good. You want more and more control.

Now that we have software standard, now we can technically build a base image for all these companies and then use software distribution on our LANDESK to push out all the individual apps all these different companies use. And I just learned that, I just recently learned that LANDESK on the next release will have an imaging component to it and profile migration, which is, it's really exciting. And there are three of them here, so feel free to talk to them about the new features, I guess. And that's it. Thank you.

So, to finish up, what we're going to do is we're going to, I've got a couple more slides, and then we're going to break down into two levels of Q&A. I'm going to get Rick and David and Mark back up here to answer some of your more specific questions about some of their hot spots and pain that they've gone through. And then what we'll do is then release everybody, and I've got representatives from the different companies here who will also gather up at the end of the stage, since we're the only thing between you and Chevy's happy hour.

So, we're going to get everybody back up here to be able to answer additional questions when we get done. But to wrap this up, one of the things I wanted to point out was that, you know, these are four significant players in the enterprise management market and very, very good players in this. But there are also other companies that fit into this task list, too, and let's not forget about all the other people that come out.

And we couldn't possibly cover everybody that's out there that provides solutions in the Mac space. So, there's an awful lot of people out there doing an awful lot of work. And I'm going to get Rick and David Zubradt back up here to answer some of their hot spots and pain that they've gone through. And providing some very, very good solutions for all of the different tasks.