SMA 10.0.290 What am i missing out on?
I joined my organization after we have already had KACE as our infrastructure and it has been my job to learn it and bring it up to speed. We are planning to update our version when we are able to update our physical servers, so hopefully in the next 6 months or so. My question is, What all am i missing between our version and SMA 12? what have your best quality of life changes in your opinion? I would like to push for my boss to make this more of a priority and would like to see what you guys thought were the best advantages, so i could reference our struggles into relationship to those pros. thanks
bonus question:
i do like KACE, its extremely powerful but at times it feels so cluttered and i have to sort of do a bunch of wonky maneuvers to get it to do certain things for my environment. i guess a way to explain what i mean is sometimes you know KACE can or should be able to do something but figuring out the best or sometimes only way to let you do that is a challenge. I wanted to use kace to automated some ticket process (request for permissions to hardware/software/etc) so that all the correct parties are automatically sent their respective information to sign off on before it made it to the IT technician, so that they didnt have to make sure all the proper steps were taken. I know how it would work in my head but i feel like when i go to set something like this up KACE has a million variables for the things i dont care about and no options to change the things i wanted too. Is this something that becomes less of a problem with the newer versions or is this an easy implementation for me now but i havent used KACE enough to know how. Ive never been trained, i just taught KACE myself. any ideas on how to implement this would be great thank you.
Answers (3)
If you ask me.... power! I heard that now in 12 you can reaaallly use the power that you put on it (ram, vCPU) besides that..... Azure/AWS backup offboard that works like a charm! I would say... also check this out https://support.quest.com/kace-systems-management-appliance/kb/335039
first an foremost:
Any bug you may find in your outdated version will not be fixed.
Any security issue which is found in your version will not be fixed. This also means security issues with the underlying environment.
Any questions in support will be: update to a supported version, please.
But my main features are security enhancements (agents tunnel to the appliance etc)
I'm still on 11, but there are benefits over 10. Prior to 11, the data between the client and server was unencrypted; 11 allows the data to be encrypted (but once that's turned on, older clients can no longer connect; make sure all the clients have been upgraded before checking the box).
Also, prior to 11, any newly installed client with the server name could connect to the server. With 11, tokens can be required during installation. If the client doesn't have the appropriate token it's put into a quarantine for review. This will prevent rouge clients from connecting (and using licenses). If you're in an organization that bills resources back to departments, different tokes can be created for different departments, and then used to keep track of the number of computers that connected with a token.
So far, our KACE SMA is available only on our internal network (and VPN), but we have some users who don't connect to the network (or VPN) for months at a time, making KACE practically useless on those computers. With the encryption and token features of 11, we're planning on putting our KACE SMA in our DMZ and making it available over the Internet (we'll probably do that right after the holidays).
