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Early adopter Marathon Oil hopes for reduced network traffic, support costs
MICROSOFT CORP. today will release a beta version of its Systems Management Server 2003 software, providing the enhanced support that corporate IT departments have been seeking for mobile clients.
Users are anxious to get their hands on the new version because the aging SMS 2.0, which shipped four years ago, didn't work well when distributing software to PC and laptop users on dial-up connections [QuickLink 29497].
"It generates a lot of network traffic, and it isn't network-- aware," said Michael Niehaus, an IT consultant at Marathon Oil Corp. in Houston.
Niehaus said he hopes SMS 2003, which Marathon Oil has been beta-testing, will "generate a fraction of the network traffic that the old SMS client did" and pay for itself "just based on support costs - not having to figure out what happened to this or that PC when it disconnected in the middle of a software install."
Better Bandwidth Use
Binary Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS), a new SMS 2003 feature based on Microsoft's...