Likelihood to Recommend The KACE Management Appliance does many different things, but does not do them as well as other products. It is an all-in-one system for Asset tracking, software management, ticketing system, Contact management, and reporting. If you require basic functionality for these, then this product will meet your needs. But when you begin needing advanced/granular functions from the appliance, it will fall short.
Read full review Well suited scenarios : One of the situations SmartDeploy helped immensly was in application deployment and management for our projects , making it and instant favorite for the deployment process. Also in one situation where we had a high flying app development which did'nt had much time to develop, deployment thorugh smart deploy made it quick and less involvement. Easier to understand major functionalities and onboard new projects. Less appropriate scenarios: We faced issues while utilising by DevOps team for monitoring every system for issue resolving in linux update on every employees system. This created alot of delay in every employees work front as systems were not working as expected
Read full review Pros Gives you real time data to systems on my network. I can get information on all applications running on devices on my network. I can get information on what systems are not currently patched and up to date with MS and Virus definitions! Read full review It allows us to maintain only one image. Much less effort required than storing and maintaining multiple images. LAN deployment works very well with few issues. Read full review Cons Configuring automated software installs is difficult, and logs do not present useful information for troubleshooting. Customer support will just refer you to search itninja.com when you call in for support issues. KACE community site (itninja.com), has outdated documentation, and answers to questions are usually vague at best. KACE Amp agent constantly breaks, and has to be re-installed on end user computers. A parent-child relationship in the ticketing system requires you to create a process. Remote provisioning fails consistently and does not provide any useful information as to why it failed. K1000 is overpriced for the jobs it actually performs and the work that is required to maintain it. Read full review Remote monitoring is useful but has some lagging and functionalities are not upfront to use , making it complicated for new users to be aware just by using the application Windows migration was quite difficult in terms of updates of softwares to be migrated to new system Integration with client systems can be tough as major usage of other softwares is done in most of client systems causing us difficulties to integrate with smart deploy on the same platform Read full review Support Rating SmartDeploy customer support has been very good. Although we do not always get a super-fast response (though always within the time stated). The tech support folks at SmartDeploy always go the extra mile to see that our immediate issues are taken care of in as timely a manner as possible. They have always been attentive to our needs and frustrations.
Read full review Alternatives Considered DAM blows away what Free wear we were previous trying to tweak and change for use to benefit the County. But as we looked into DAM we saw much more available with this product compared to what we had been trying to use over the last 10 years. It took a lot of convincing to get County Administration on board with County IT but after we had Dell come in and demo software and appliand to BOS and County Administrator they saw the added benefits of going with DAM! It has been a great addition to our County IT tools!
Read full review SmartDeploy has a fantastic deployment process management with detailed and configurable aspects. Even though it has detailed configuration it still somehow makes it easy to understand and implement compared to other services which need special learning and courses to understand them completelya and use them efficiently. This is one quality highly appreciated and stacks up against any other services I have used for deployment
Read full review Return on Investment Asset Tracking works exceptionally well, until the AMP agent breaks an endpoint machine. Quick re-install of the AMP agent usually resolves the issue. The remote provisioning tool fails 90% of the time. If this worked properly or informed us why the remote provisioning failed, this tool could become an invaluable asset. We canceled the support contact because the renewal price was expensive and cost just as much as the initial purchase price. Read full review Very fast as an image deployment solution for new PCs. We do not have to create a completely new image when new hardware comes out. This is an amazing time-saver on its own. With offline deployment and some workarounds, this is allowing us to migrate many Windows 7 units, rather than having to upgrade each one or load from scratch or replace it with new hardware. Read full review ScreenShots