All products we installed for testing used Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition running on a server with a 2.5GHz CPU and 2GB of RAM. Altiris and PatchLink each supplied VMware images of their products, which we ran on the same Win 2003 system in partitioned instances. Kace supplied an appliance running its KBOX software.

Agents supplied by each vendor were deployed to client systems running Windows XP or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Once installed, we tested each product's ability to handle patch deployments, registry key changes, system configuration changes and other software deployments. We launched these changes manually or scheduled remediation to happen at a future time. In our deployment tests, we examined options including reboot control, sending user messages and user deferrals. We also created a custom check to search for a specific registry key and run a script if the key was not found.

For reporting, we attempted to create a report showing missing Windows security patches, remediation actions taken for a specific computer and remediation actions taken over a period of time for all computers. We also tried to create a report showing time to remediation from first identified date and to create custom reports, which are defined as something not available in the default reports.