KACE Systems Management Appliance vs Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security

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

Any organization that is running Office 365 for email should have EMS licenses. The benefits are manifold compared to the reasonable cost. Truthfully, I think a lot of the features should be part of an O365 Business Premium license, but since the EMS license is a drop in the bucket, it's hard to complain.

• 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.

• Azure AD Single Sign-On -- this is my favorite feature of EMS + Security. It is easy to setup and MS has simple instructions for most popular cloud services.
• InTune -- the changeover from the old InTune Client/Silverlight Portal has been painful, but once you get Win10 devices setup with InTune, management is a breeze.

• 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.

• InTune deployment via Hybrid Azure AD. The instructions seem very simple but there are lots of little areas you can get tripped up and there is little logging to see where you've gone wrong.
• Advanced Threat Protection anti-impersonation. It is WAY too sensitive. Users emailing themselves from personal accounts get their mail sent to quarantine just because the name/label of the personal account matches their Office 365 mailbox name/label? HUH???
• Licensing. Typical of Microsoft, what you're actually getting and details of licensing are confusing.

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.

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.

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.

EMS integrates directly with Office 365. It offers multiple desired features in one product/subscription. It's difficult to do a 1:1 comparison between each product. OneLogin's pre-sales support was terrible and implementation was complex. Barracuda offers great email protection but hard to justify the cost when EMS can just be added on to existing Office 365 accounts and brings additional benefit in SSO, etc.

• 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

• SSO setup through Azure AD has saved IT staff countless hours of lost passwords, multiple password resets, offboarding departed staff accounts, etc.
• Anti malware/phishing policies have prevented active malware/phishing campaigns.