Will these LANDesk tools stay free?

I've had some emails over the last week or so asking if these LANDesk enhancements are really going to stay free. I wanted to say clearly that the free tools (and some others we are working on) will remain free. That's not to say we won't have some products that are chargeable in the near future though. Our aim is to give poweful utilities to help our fellow administrators but also to provide powerful value-add components for a reasonable cost.

Watch this space...

Wake-On-WAN for LANDesk is here

We've made this available for everyone now. The plug-in is free to download and use. Hope you all find it useful.

http://www.marxtar.com/products/WakeOnWAN/LANDesk-Wake-On-WAN.htm

Mark Star

LANDesk's New Power Management Plug-in

I recently posted on a LANDesk community thread in answer to questions around power management and suggested that the user should take a look at Power State Notifier Lite as a way to get a clearer picture of their environment's power state. Shortly afterward, LANDesk themselves posted that the upcoming SP2 for 8.8 would include a new Power management module which I found very interesting so thought I'd take a look at what was posted.

What I saw made me think that LANDesk's module and MarXtar's Power State Notifier products would be complementary. From what i can see from the document attached to the thread, the new SP2 functionality will improve the way that power policies are applied to machines and also allow a level of predictive analysis of potential cost savings, however what doesn't appear to be there is any level of monitoring of what is really happening on the systems.

This is where PSN Lite (and our upcoming PSN full version) can complement since we provide data on the power state of the machines that can be used to report on what policies could be applied as well as how those policies are affecting the systems. LANDesk sets the policies while we provide the reports.

Best of all, SP2 gives its functionality for free and PSN Lite does too. What could be better than that?!

Here's the thread... http://community.landesk.com/support/thread/1722

Mark Star

LANDesk Wake-on-WAN (WoW!)

When I first looked to buy LANDesk as an end user, I was told about the wonderful possibilities of Wake-On-LAN (WoL) by the salesperson. Strangely though, that salesperson didn't mention the barriers to WoL traversing subnets and being a relative IT newbie myself at the time I didn't realise. I was a little disappointed to learn that my right-click Wake Up option didn't do anything outside of the network where I was running my console.

I was pleased when LANDesk added WoL to multicast so that the subnet representatives would perform the wake up, but it was frustrating having to create dummy distribution tasks just to get a machine to wake up.

As we have been building the MarXtar Universe of products I couldn't resist the opportunity to give something to my fellow LANDesk users by creating what we have been calling Wake-On-WAN.

As with Power State Notifier Lite, WoW will be a free plug-in to LANDesk that will allow you to remotely wake up one or more machines even if they are on a remote subnet. We are putting the finishing touches to it now and will be posting more information once it is ready for release.


Hope you all like it!

Mark Star - Managing Director MarXtar Ltd

LANDesk Free Power State Notifier Plug-in

MarXtar has added a free LANDesk plug-in to the MarXtar Universe. This plug-in gives real-time information about the Power Status of LANDesk managed devices.

Now at a glance administrators can see which machines are on, off, or in a standby/hibernation state as well as whether the user is logged on/off or the system is locked.

Free to all existing LANDesk customers, Power State Notifier Lite gives clearer visibility of the environment, aids software deployment, and enables planning to reduce power consumption.

http://www.marxtar.com