My firm is considering a move to SCCM 2007 (from Novell/Zenworks). We have around 150 people. I am looking for some high-level reviews/thoughts of people in similar-sized firms, suggestions for products that compete with SCCM, or anything else that would be helpful in making a decision.

 Thank you in advance.

I work for a government based organisation here in the UK, we are about 400 strong and I have just been through the entire process that you're going through now. I had a look at products like Altiris, Kaseya, Prism Deploy, Symantec Ghost Solution Suite and SCCM. I finally got it down to two products, Altiris (including the Rapid Deployment Pack from HP as we already own this) and MS Config Mgr. In the end it all came down to what would work in our new infrastructure.

We are going to be migrating to 2008 server from an NT4 based domain and to put it simply Altiris simply won't work in a pure 2008 environment, you can't install the current version 6.9 and at the time of asking Altiris couldn't provide me with a release date for version 7.

Since making the decision to go with Config Mgr I have spent a lot of time using the product, been on a course and even sat the Microsoft exam for it. I have to say I am converted, I just love the product, sure it has it's quirks (bare metal builds until R2 were a bit of a nightmare) but all in all it's exactly what we need.

 I would say however that in your environment you wouldn't need to go for the full blown SCCM product, you should find that SCE (System Center Essentials) is more suited to you.

I have no other life than with SCCM, so I am obviously leaning in that direction. However, due to the size of your organization the cost "may" or may not be a good fit. SCCM is a great product, but it may be overkill for the size of your organization. How many sites do you have (physical locations) and what are the WAN speeds? If all are at the same location, a single server would be more than enough to do all you wanted to. Although 150 seats is not a lot, SCCM could be extremely benefitial. Starting with the company at this size, if they get bigger, you will already have the foundation in place. Hope it helps....