Latest Ghost expands PC management

Symantec Corp. has released its Ghost 7.0 Enterprise Edition, a PC management tool that enables administrators to deploy, configure, back up, restore and distribute software and user-specific images to network and mobile PCs from a central console.

Two additions to the latest version of Ghost — a user migration function and an incremental backup utility — should prove especially useful to government users, said Lee Balzer, group product manager in Symantec's Enterprise Administration division.

User migration enables an administrator to capture a user's file directories and desktop settings and copy them to a new PC. "First you get the user settings to capture the look and feel, and then you get the data files," Balzer said. "It's ideal for [migration to] Windows 2000."

Although other products offer a similar feature, "they're client-to-client based so you have to be there to do it. Symantec does it remotely so you don't have to send a technician out there, which would be good for government users in large buildings," he said.

An incremental backup, which creates an image of changes since the last backup, can be performed on a schedule or manually as needed.

"It can be a full Ghost image, which would be done weekly or monthly, or periodically for incremental images, which takes less time and is less of a load on the network," Balzer said.

Ghost 7.0 is available from Symantec's government resellers, which include GTSI Corp., ASAP Software and CDW-G Inc. It is sold on a per-node basis, with 100 seats costing $15 each; discounts are available for larger volume buys.Use links from Web story.