Smart Deploy / PDQ

[garethEds]

Good afternoon Everyone,

 

PDQ have announced a link up with Smart Deploy (smartdeploy.com) - does anyone use this deploy their systems? If so - how would you compare it to MDT? Is it worth the cost. Website shows as quote expensive starting from $1020.

 

Interested to know if anyone does us it.

 

Cheers

 

Gareth

[leeshellard]

I’m also interested if anyone has used Smartdeploy. It does list education discount but no pricing.

[howartp]

I've started watching the PDQ announcement video twice and fallen asleep both times!

 

But certainly interested in it as we're looking to ditch CC4.

[ITGuyNW]

I used Smartdeploy a few years ago, approx 2016 and I found it very hit and miss.

 

Apart from it automatically grabbing drivers, I don't see the benefit in moving from my current WDS/MDT/PDQ setup.

[garethEds]

I used Smartdeploy a few years ago, approx 2016 and I found it very hit and miss.

 

Apart from it automatically grabbing drivers, I don't see the benefit in moving from my current WDS/MDT/PDQ setup.

 

I guess that was the point of my original question. Is there any point? If you have your drivers in MDT and a driver selection policy then this software is not worth the money? How do people update their drivers - or don't they bother?

 

Gareth

[ITGuyNW]

I guess that much like PDQ is an alternative to WSUS, Smartdeploy is an alternative to MDT. If you already have an MDT setup and are happy then there's no point moving.

[garethEds]

With the issues I'm currently having with MDT and Windows 11 22H2, and with MDT now not supported for Windows 11 I'm re-looking at SmartDeploy. I will try fixing MDT first of course, but it it's going to be a pain in the future I wonder if it's worth changing.

 

We are nowhere near InTune deployment.

 

Gareth

[robjduk]

I would bloody love Smart deploy but I was quoted £4000 for 300 licenses with an education discount applied.

 

My long term plan is to either look at FOG which I hear is good or if we can ditch SIMS (fingers crossed), I'll look at Intune and go domainless.

[garethEds]

Well - turns out, I've fixed it. A missing driver. A driver that on the Lenovo page for this model. How annoying.

 

Hopefully fixed for another school as well in the local area.

 

Thanks everyone.

 

Gareth