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NSMC 4.0 by Bob Kelly	Page 6 of 6 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Scalability and Load Balancing – NSMC provides built-in load balancing and redundancy and boasts an unlimited scalable architecture. By installing multiple services of the same type in your environment, and pointing them at the same database using the service options, queued items specific to that service type will be shared among each installed service equally. At the same time, if one of the services were to face a failure of some kind, the queued tasks would continue to execute normally on the other services of the same type in the environment.

Remote Shutdowns – This is a feature often overlooked, leaving administrators to script there own solution to managing shutdowns and restarts. The NSMC implementation allows you to trigger a remote logoff, restart, shutdown, or power off a system and optionally force applications to close. (See image at right.)

RFID Support – The inventory solution includes the ability to store Radio Frequency Identification data from third party applications built to work with RFID technology. An Administrator can import data into the NSMC database and the information will be displayed with the device using the Device Viewer in the NSMC console.

System Profiles - Profiles allow administrators to configure users of the console that will have access to the functionality related to scanning, software distribution, and monitoring, but restricts access to configuring the console and services.

NSMC provides an excellent set of features with no client installation required. Most of the value provided by NSMC comes in the form of valuable reports – not just simple inventory but as compliance and baseline reporting information.

It is a big deal, so I'll point it out one more time: these features come with no requirement for a client side agent or service installation- something most administrators will find as a considerable benefit. While the application deployment solution comes across as immature in its current release, the asset management and monitoring features are very well executed.

Installation is quick and will not affect your client systems at all, so I encourage you to install the trial version and see for yourself.

Update (12/8/05): This review was held back by request while the issues identified in this review were addressed. I am told that the issues identified have all been corrected since this review was performed.

Bob Kelly
8/15/2005

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