ARD: Apple screenshare.app on steroids
April 17, 2017

ARD: Apple screenshare.app on steroids

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Apple Remote Desktop

Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) is our primary remote desktop sharing tool on our HQ LAN, which consists of mostly Macs. Secondarily, we use it to deploy software packages to our local Mac users.
  • Screen sharing with Macs
  • Remote Control of Macs
  • I would like to see more included Unix scrips that can be pushed to clients.
  • Inclusion of a way to remote control or screen share with Windows machines would be useful, as I manage a handful of Windows machines. While this would be possible using VNC on the Windows machines, including the ability to connect using Windows terminal connections would be awesome, for me.
  • Since we were a mostly Mac environment, ARD made a lot of sense and it still does for our core HQ users. However moving forward a cross/multi platform tools would be more valuable.
  • ARD is relatively cost effective, no subscription fee, easy to purchase via the AppStore and with Macs, just works.
For multi-site remote support we utilize TeamViewer and for enterprise-wide device management we are using Cisco Meraki System Manager. ARD is a great Mac tool, but there are many options out there, that are cloud-based, that don't require you to have network tunnels into your multiple sites. TeamViewer has great session compression and seems well optimized for multisite, global device management, but TeamViewer leans a bit more toward Windows, with regards to management. Both TV and Cisco Meraki System Manager are quite a bit more expensive than ARD, which should be a consideration as well.
ARD for me is based on a LAN, but can be used over WAN via VPN, but the latency makes ARD a less ideal tool. There are other cross platform tools that can do what ARD does which to me add value when managing a mixed environment.

Apple Remote Desktop Feature Ratings

Screen sharing
9
File transfer
8
Instant message
7
Access to sleeping/powered-off computers
6
Over-the-Internet remote session
5
Remote management of servers & workstations
8
Centralized management dashboard
Not Rated
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