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Great features, but buggy software and mediocre support
February 02, 2016

Great features, but buggy software and mediocre support

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AppSense

AppSense is used on all company owned Windows computers in our network, across all locations. We use it for software personalization and for doing some custom actions that would otherwise typically be done via logon script or group policy. For example, we use it to map printers for users based on their location and/or AD group membership. We also use Application Manager to automatically run some legacy software with admin rights. This happens transparently without the user having admin rights and without seeing a UAC prompt and is a very useful feature for any application that requires admin rights to run. It also allows users to self-install certain pre-approved applications while not giving them rights to install any random software.
  • Application Manager - automatic elevation of certain software to run with admin rights, transparent to users IF you set it all up properly in advance. Once you have this configured, it can be very beneficial.
  • Environment Manager - custom actions based on detected conditions. For example, mapping one set of network drives once a user connects to a certain network, and a different set of network drives when they connect to a different network. And automatically remove the network drives when the user disconnects from the network. Do X, Y, and Z if a certain process starts or stops. If process A starts, automatically start process B.
  • It's buggy in general. I have seen a lot of weird problems caused by AppSense. Corrupt user profiles, random crashes, etc.
  • If/Else/ElseIf statements can be confusing to build, especially when nesting several due to the way they are displayed.
  • Support is not great.
  • Faster/easier to deploy legacy applications that require admin rights without granting full admin rights to users.
  • Fast and flexible deployment of things like new/default printers, settings, etc based on simple or elaborate conditions.
  • RES Software
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.
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.