I received a comment from Customer X Factor on one of last weeks' posts:  

Problem with Dell Managment tools is that,

 a) nobody knows how to us them or find them

 b) sales people inside dell dont push them, as they want you to buy 3rd party stuff that they can sell you.

The first part of that is actually addressable, although it is a bit of a secret that shouldn't be.  Dell's TechCenter has a lot of great information and technical chats -where they have access to lab equipment and can check stuff out - more or less in real time - or close to it.  Read this chat transcript from last Tuesday's chat if you want to get an idea of how it works.

Tomorrow's chat is on how to migrate management routines from HP's Insight Manager to Dell's OpenManage tools. 3:00 Central time. 

Then there's other stuff (technical papers/wikis) that describe stuff to make your lives' easier like the one on applying bios updates to Windows systems using Microsoft's SCCM.

As for the 2nd criticism - that our sales people don't push them.  I'm curious - what do they push?   Have others experienced our inside sales people prioritizing third party products over our own?  Just curious......