Ivanti Environment Manager vs. KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA)

AppSense does solve a lot of problems and can do some cool things. However, I think competing products may do the same job without some of the bugs and issues I have seen with AppSense. The automatic/transparent "run as Administrator" feature is very slick when set up properly and makes dealing with poorly coded legacy applications very easy. The flexibility it gives you with all of the stuff it can do is great. Take actions X, Y, and Z at logon based on these conditions, etc.

Incentivized

I think it has added value for any organization. It reduced our Tech Support cost by: -Supporting users anywhere -Reducing users downtime as well keep them informed with the status of their tickets -Managing software and hardware actively -Processing automation -deploy mass software installs, patching or updates - Provide approved software's to users to install without IT help

Incentivized

• Capturing application settings per user.
• Office policy settings.
• Granular control of settings per application.

Incentivized

• Inventory: KACE provides a ton of hardware and software inventory information that is easy to search, filter, and export. This is critical when we need to find the answers to questions about how many of such and such we have in our fleet.
• Patch Management: We were using WSUS before and it was altogether too cumbersome. KACE has given us the power, flexibility, and verification we need to feel comfortable our patches are up-to-date.
• Service Queue: We made KACE our help desk system and it does everything we need it to do. Great improvement over our old system.

Incentivized

• High learning curve to deploy

Incentivized

• The KACE SMA needs a better way to handle different roles in the software so certain users can access or administrate certain parts of the software, but not the entire software installation.
• The KACE SMA could improve the ticketing process of projects. The aspects of the title and some information do not always flow down from the parent ticket to its child tickets.
• The KACE SMA could improve the UI of the software with the addition of different CSS color schemes.

Incentivized

It has been a very affective tool for our company.

Incentivized

It was relatively easy to configure.

Incentivized

Overall, the software is simple to understand and use. That said, most vendors have been slowly updating their user interfaces to HTML5 so that they have a clean updated look and feel. This is where KACE falls short in that the UI is great for a packaged software 10 years ago. This isn't a major limitation as the software is really meant primarily for technology users.

Incentivized

Always had a great experience dealing with the engineers.

Incentivized

KACE does exactly what you need it to do, it maintains your computer environment. You can set patch schedules, inventory computers, setup software catalogs; basically everything you need to ensure the computers on your network are being actively managed. This is all with little need for constant configuration or updating the setup.

Incentivized

Test, test, test.

Incentivized

The decision to use AppSense was not mine. If I had to choose a product today, I would at least want to evaluate the alternative from RES Software - from what I have read/heard it sounds like the better choice as far as reliability, support, and lack of bugs. I have not personally used it yet though.

Incentivized

We have selected this software because it rolls several different systems into one. We have a helpdesk system with this and an asset and inventory management system as well. We pay one price for the whole system instead of paying multiple companies different amounts that would have totaled more than we pay for the single system.

Incentivized

• By capping the CPU shares accessible by a rogue application, AppSense allowed us to continue to provide what the customers required while adjustments to the application were performed.

Incentivized

• KACE has saved us from having to spend several days of employee hours in crafting DVDs and duplicating them (100+ DVDs)
• KACE has saved us on the postage required to send out those DVDs for every update (monthly) to all of our customers electronically

Incentivized