SmartDeploy

Pros: Amazed how straight forward the entire process is, from creating the image to deploying the image had the system up and ready within a day.

The single console to push images and capture profiles.

Cons: Needs to have more information when capturing a profile, like a meter or timer.

Overall: Would recommend this to anyone using SCCM or struggling with their image process.

Pros: - Deployments are now easy to manage and deploy through the centralized server
- Cloud storage integration to restore the device through the internet and a boot drive
- Pricing is straight forward and clear. Just pay per device and monthly fee for technical support service
- Automatic Driver Installation

Cons: - Product is mature and driver support is for all popular brands and makes, but obscure laptop brands are not fully supported

Overall: Smartdeploy helps my company deploy laptops with centralized images. They have an assortment of drivers for all popular makes and brands. HP, DELL, Lenovo, etc.

Get started in as little as 15 minutes and start reimaging machines!

Pros: -One of the easier Windows imaging platforms to stand up and create and deploy images.
-Built in driver packages for most business PCs
-Simple but versatile. Can deploy images via USB/DVD or cloud storage (like Google Drive), but I use the integrated WDS support.
-Light or (at least mostly) Zero touch. Native support for running scripts during imaging process and the ability to boot to PE and pick an image or automatically apply an image.
-Pricing is straight forward and reasonable
-The native hardware-agnostic image capture works automatically and allows 1 image to be used for many models with very different hardware.

Cons: The workflow is a little different, or worded differently, than other products I've used in the past, which presented a little bit of a learning curve to get going. After reading the documentation I still had to take advantage of support to get SD configured how I expected it to work.

Overall: SmartDeploy made Windows 10 image creation and deployment much easier than I expected. I am familiar with tools such as Altiris, WDS, and MDT, and this was by far the easiest experience for creating new images. I recommend building Deployment Packages for use with WDS for seamless network-based deployment.

Pros: -Deploying images is super easy with SD. We're just using a bootable usb flash drive at the moment, and it's done with everything installed in 20-30 minutes.
-Their driver packages are great, and they update them regularly. They seem to be very active with keeping things updated.
-They've also added a feature to push software packages so your golden image can JUST be a Windows installation. They've got some of the usual software packages pre-built and recently added one for Office 365 which works great.
-They have great tutorial videos online for setting up everything in the first place, and support has been very responsive when I've had questions.

Cons: -We use the "warm capture" feature to grab an image of a virtual machine we created, rather than use a physical machine as our golden image. It works great, but documentation on the process was pretty limited and took a lot of trial and error to get working.

Overall: We've really enjoyed Smart Deploy, and it's cut down our imaging and deployment process time considerably. Their attentiveness to updates and upgrades has added useful features and made sure we're deploying up to date drivers.

Pros: I like the driver packs and the wizard driven menu for creating images. It is fairly easy to use and saves time.

Cons: I am not a fan of the new pricing. They used to let you image as many machines as you want. I already have other software that deploys packages and I am not using the cloud deployment yet.

Overall: Overall this is a great product that lets you reduce the hassle when imaging machines by having one image to build and many easy to use driver packs.

Pros: Ease of use, driver packs, BIOS updating and the ability to push software.

Cons: So far the only thing that bothers me is it seems like multiple techs can't use it at once...or I'm just doing something wrong / not understanding that part of it.

Overall: Haven't been using it very long yet. Have yet to deploy an image through the console, USB only so far, but it's working great. Was easy to get up and running.

Pros: After trying to implement MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit), we ran into some issues and not having technical support was difficult for our technicians. Smart Deploy is a better alternative since it includes support, a very self-intuitive interface, and good help documentation/videos.

Cons: I wish that each license would come with unlimited support (and phone support), instead, you have to pay for different levels of support.

Overall: We were able to use Smart Deploy as a solid solution in under a few months (side project). So far, each push has saved us a few hours for each push. Overall very satisfied with this as a solution and support has been helpful in getting us what we need.

Pros: Customer support is top notch. Easy to use, easy to create an image with all drivers that are needed. I created an image on a shared network drive and point all new installs to use that image which can be updated anytime without having to create new bootable media. Saved lots of time on new builds

Cons: for me the amount of time to create an image is a bit slow.

Overall: I am very pleased with SmartDeploy. Its ease of use and customer service are great!

Pros: Ease of use
Support team very responsive
Constantly updating
Huge selection of driver packs
Cost effective yet feature rich

Cons: Instructions on website for setup are outdated they do not match the version that is currently released
Took sometime to follow the directions since we had to hunt for the feature they were talking about.

Overall: I have used Altiris, Micrsoft SCCM, PDQ, and others to deploy workstations and Smartdeploy is by far the easiest to use. Updating your golden image is easy and not having to update drivers on the main image makes it so much easier managing your images.

Pros: Rollout is easy.
Easy to build, capture and deploy an image.
Cheapest paid imaging solution that has this feature set.

Cons: Application deployment still seems to be in its infancy and is more complicated than other solutions.

Overall: From start to finish this software has been a really big help in getting our new machines deployed after our previous solution died on us (SCCM). It has saved us countless hours due to all of this. I hope that they make the application deployment more robust and easier to use as it's still more complicated to use than SCCM was.

Pros: Minimal upkeep, out of the box solution, relatively straight forward GUI, support is responsive, provided driver packs (see cons as well), multiple deployment options (network, offline, over the internet), received a lot of pre-sales assistance to implement a proof of concept.

Cons: Customizations are cumbersome (i.e. running PS and CMD scripts is possible, but the syntax is strange), MDT type xml customizations are not possible, driver packs are out of date, about 2-3 times slower than MDT/DISM, does not auto-generate and store logs on server if imaging is initiated via usb (must script copying the log file back), expensive for the service it offers, limited service tickets per month.

Overall: If you are looking for a simple out-of-the-box solution that requires minimal training and administration, then Smart Deploy will probably be perfect for you. We opted for it in our Small Enterprise because we needed to implement a solution that was quick to setup and would not take time away from other administrative responsibilities. It also needed to be plug-and-play for the technicians doing the imaging.

Cost: The product is very expensive for the service it offers in my opinion. Sites say "Starts at 15, but that is deceptive. That is a very high volume price. Anyone with that number of computers is a large enterprise that I am sure already has a solution in place. I am sure they also require customizations beyond the Smart Deploy offering. That 15 is also the price minus the "support contract". So it's 15 + 3-4 for ongoing support. But the support isn't just raising tickets with them, it's the driver packs as well, so that means you need to pay for the support. The solution is not customizable enough for large enterprise, and too expensive for small-mid businesses. That give Smart Deploy a strange gray area of usefulness where the organization probably has the knowledge to implement something better or cheaper like MDT, it just doesn't have the manpower. That is where we fell in.

Support: This is the first SaaS solution I have purchased where the contact you purchase dictates the number of tickets you are allowed to raise. the normal contract only allows for 5 tickets per month. As previously mentioned, I needed to perform some customizations to the imaging process which Smart Deploy does not make straight forward. After a production deployment I went back counted 42 different questions/issues I had to ask the pre-sales engineer for assistance on. I was even provided incorrect documentation from them that did not work. That means the standard level of support provided would not have been sufficient for me to implement in my organization.

To recap, if you want to customize the imaging process, then Smart Deploy is not for you. If you need something quickly in place that requires minimal administration, then it is.

Pros: Quick and scalable imaging process.
Make yourself a VM and deploy to any make/model PC in minutes.

Cons: a little difficult to add additional software packages after the image has been created. but really it is a non-issue

Overall: SmartDeploy helped us deploy over 200 new machines to our organization, with identical images across 3 different PC models. This saved us several hundred hours of work when we were manually updating the image for the necessary new PC models. A real life saver!

Pros: simple to get started, successfull deployment in few hours

Cons: nothing, it does exactly what we require it to do, and have a super support team behind it

Overall: Overal, it does exactly what a smb it partner need, and it suits all sizes of companies

first impression
i started the trial and downloaded the software, created a virtual machine, and captured it, i redeployed it to another virtual machine in about 2-3 hours

deployment
instead of building it from scratch up, you create a virtual machine with windows 10, install all your software, capture it, and deploy, same quality every time, easy to set up zero-touch deployment

cloud deployment
smartdeploy utilizes the cloud, making it possible for you to have large sets of images, and a broad device support!

it is a 10 out of 10 for us, as it have reduced the need for manual labor when it comes to deploying and preparing pc's

Pros: Very easy to use, very quick to image PC's. So easy to configure and once you have it how you want you can push the image out in minutes.

Cons: Nothing to not like, only issue we found was with a driver not being 100% what we needed but SmartDeploy helped us resolve our issue in no time at all. They were easy to contact and quick to resolve the issue.

Overall: We upgraded 250 computers to Windows 10 by creating an image and putting them on new hard drives. We were able to do entire branches in a day where before we were only getting 1 completed in a day. SmartDeploy made our process 100% better and faster.