KACE Asset Management Appliance vs. SmartDeploy

We are a small to mid-size County Government and this has been fit great for our IT HelpDesk needs for tracking tickets and creating a How-To data base for users issues. If you have a system on your network DAM will find it and report back to you on its current status and any issues or items that may need to be addressed, such as patches or updates for MS or AV!

Incentivized

It works really well as an image maintenance and roll-out platform, allowing maintenance of a single "Gold" image. New features allow the deployment of some software packages as part of image deployment. It does not work very well as a maintenance platform in any use for us, but especially not well-suited for Windows 7 to Windows 10 migrations over WAN.

Incentivized

• Monitors remote computers and tracks software installed on those computers.
• Smart labels allow for automation of software installs/upgrades using analytics.
• Contract monitoring system with alerts when a third party contract is nearing expiration.
• Comes with a ticketing system, that can have multiple ticket queues, to manage incoming requests for support.
• Using processes, you can automate opening multiple tickets for work needed on a task. (ie. open multiple predefined tickets for a new employee hire).
• Kace has had substantial improvements since Quest assumed ownership from Dell.
• You can configure notifications for almost anything, since you can utilize their wizard or manually write your own SQL queries.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• As with most items in IT there is a learning curve to using this product. But once you get the general idea of how this software flows it is quite easy to navigate and get information.
• Has a good reporting base but it was easy to learn how to make your own specific reports!
• I would like to see more color options for dash board setup is sorta blah!!

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

The appliance and software does its job, as it's intended to. There aren't many other bells and whistles. integrates well with MFA (okta), integrates well with KACES SDA. The modules it has will suit most needs. If you have the money in the budge, i'd suggest going with professional services to help with the setup/integration. There are some parts that are cumbersome and may require support. Save yourself the headache

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We were not able to get SCCM to stabilize and work, it would continually fail to add computers to groups and fail to install programs/updates to computers in a defined group. Continually, user community forums kept recommending to replace it with another solution. JIRA is a much more efficient ticketing system, and we migrated the ticketing system from KACE to JIRA.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Implemented inventory system without having to purchase a secondary product, cutting down cost.

Incentivized

• New application created was deployed by SmartDeploy and saved us 20% of our deployment time on whole project providing us major time to build new functionalities and release product earlier
• Computer imaging was quite elaborate and yet simple, making it helpful for our client system creation activity. Which helped us bag us new activities of system creation for more projects.
• Driver management was causing lots of time consumption for system management team. Which in-turn reduced their focus on actual system issues. With SmartDeploy it helped in improving efficiency of 30% for system management team

Incentivized