KACE Desktop Authority [EOL] Reviews

We use it for pass out of our printers, for our drive mapping, and we use it somewhat for asset management. I'm mostly using it for the steps saved and the time saved in adding and subtracting drives, as we move through jobs. It's pretty powerful software and we don't really use all of it.

It's on one of our Active Directory instances, but the batch file goes out off of either of our instances when a person logs in.

Desktop Authority is nice for us because we can pass out all of our drive mappings and our printers, throughout the office and the shop. Our environment is a very big place because we're a steel fabricator. We don't fabricate steel racks for your kitchen. We're fabricating steel buildings and beams for highrises. We're sitting on a few acres of property, so it's nice to be able to deploy and fix things without always having to walk everywhere or physically go to a machine to map a drive. It's easier to use than doing it in Windows Active Directory, which I never have loved at all.

One of the benefits is time savings. If we make a change to a job and I want to pull a drive off of a set of computers, I can do it without having to leave my desk. Before we started using the solution, I would have had to go to every machine. That was a much more cumbersome way of handling it. That is one way it does save me time, probably a few hours every month. I don't have to mess around with something that I can do by opening up Desktop Authority. I can make a few changes, apply those changes, and I'm done in a matter of a few minutes. In the old days, I would have had to go outside, to every machine and every computer.

We have jobs that run anywhere from two months to two years. We did a lot of steel for the Rams' stadium, SoFi Stadium in California. That job is still going and it's four years in. But at some point, we're going to want to shut that job down, and we'll shut that particular drive off of the network. And that's the advantage. I can individually go in and say, "Okay, we're done fabricating steel for this job. The shop doesn't need to see this information anymore," and I can pull it away from them really easily with this software. That's one of the things that is a huge benefit for me. That's where it's saving me time.

For what I use the solution for, it works really well. I'm really happy with it. I don't think I'd be with it for almost 13 years if it wasn't working the way I wanted it to.

In terms of configuring everything the way I need it to be for our environment, it's great. That's exactly what it does for me. It works.

It would be nice if it were a little easier to maneuver around the patch management. I would like to use that more, but it got very cumbersome and complicated when I tried to use it in the past. I haven't used that much since then.

I started using KACE Desktop Authority in 2008.

It never breaks. It never gives me a problem. For the minimal way that I use it, compared to what some people do, I never have a problem with it. It just works, always.

Considering that we doubled in size since we started using it, the scalability of the solution is really good.

We have about 40 users including people in HR, accounting, shop, QD, project management, and detailing. Those are just some of the areas where it gets used a lot.

For what we use it for, we use it extensively. I have plans to increase the usage of it, but I just haven't done that yet.

Another one of the reasons we've kept the solution is that the tech support has been insanely great over the years. Whenever we deploy a new server and it has that main KACE software on it, I don't even bother running the deploy myself. I just set up a time up with Quest and some guy gets on and goes through the whole process. It's all done and it works just as needed. They do a really good job.

We use the vendor's Premier Support. We don't deploy Desktop Authority very often, maybe once every six years, and things change in our industry a lot. Trying to be an expert in deploying it is tough to do. They have great expertise in deployment. Premier Support has added value to our overall investment in the solution. If I came across another KACE product that I wanted to use, the Premier Support would certainly factor into my wanting to buy it.

In the past, I've used server-based deployment for mapping drives, but I don't like that approach.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. Back in 2009, it took about two hours. The last time we did a deployment, it took about an hour.

In terms of our implementation strategy, our big priority was to get all of our drive mappings and our servers onto all the computers in the shop, so that we could control access to the servers, and make it easier and quicker, without having to take all of that time it would require to go out and do it.

For deployment and maintenance, it's just me.

I used deployment support from Quest, when we bought it.

If the solution is saving me three hours a month, those 36 hours a year, at what they pay me per hour, is well over that $500 range that we pay for the solution.

It's worth the money. It does what we need it to do at a very cost-effective rate.

Cost was a big factor when we made the decision to go with it. It wasn't very expensive, and it's not even very expensive now. I pay less than $500 a year for it.

The pricing is really good, and fair.

Get the Premier Support because when you do have to do a reinstall, it's worth every penny. At least in my case, there's some software I work with every day, like Office. And I'm really good at Office. And I can work on Exchange day in and day out. I do a lot of that. I don't do a lot with this software, by comparison. With those five or six years between installs, I don't have time to try to keep up with every little update and every little change. With Premier Support I can say, "Hey, we put in a new server. We need to upgrade this." The other thing they help with is that every year or two a much newer version comes out. I call them up, set a time, they come and, 30 minutes later, they're done and we're on the latest version and everybody is happy.

I don't really use the remote control feature of the solution. I was using that for a while, years ago, but have since moved over to TeamViewer for that. I've used the patch deployment some, but it's never been my favorite part of the software, so I can't say that I use it on a regular basis.

Overall, it's a set-it-and-forget-it program. We set it and when I need to make a change I go in and make the change. I'm in the solution for 10 minutes and I don't go into it for another two weeks or a month or even two months. It's not something that needs a lot of babysitting.