Administrators everywhere know the hassle of application deployment, patch management, update distribution and all the other tedious tasks that take forever but must be done on a regular basis.

For its ability to help administrators with those tasks, Microsoft's Systems Management Server 2003 Service Pack 1 earned a Gold Award in TechTarget's Windows Products of the Year for enterprise desktop administration.

Features for this Windows-only management software include more than 120 pre-built Web reports, vulnerability assessment and mitigation tools, a new patch deployment wizard and distribution tools. Further, SMS 2003 SP1 has the capacity to run self-healing application installations on "locked-down" systems. It comes with a new client that taps the power of Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) technology to automatically detect the capacity of the client network connection and adjust transfer rates. And the lackluster support for mobile clients that plagued SMS 2002 has been dramatically improved, judges noted.

SMS 2003 SP1 was also praised by the judges for ease of integration with other Microsoft products, such as Active Directory, Microsoft Operations Manager, Virtual PC, Application Center and Internet Information Services.

Estimated retail pricing for Systems Management Server 2003 with 10-device client access licenses is $1,219.

Matt Danielsson, editor