Thoughts on KACE v8?
I spun up a sandbox vm of KACE v8 and while it does offer some enhancements, I have to say that I'm mildly disappointed. While I do believe the product is moving in the right direction, the pacing seems to have been extremely slow between products 7 and 8. There seems to be fewer enhancements between major editions, or I'm setting my expectations too high.
Some of my criticisms based a cursory overview
1. The new theme. It's way too bright, and there doesn't appear to be away to manually select themes. Maybe this should be a feature request, but I really appreciate the theme in version 7 even if the colors aren't what I'd choose, I feel the new theme is going to be migraine inducing.
2. The introduction of contracts is a great idea, but I feel that it leaves too little in flexibility in regards to customization. There are 3 default contract types - hardware, software, other. I built a custom asset "contract-test" but realized there's no method to add it to the list of available contract types. I don't feel the current list of supported types covers the scope at which I would find it functional. E.g. If I sort by contract type "other" it's going to yield results for all contracts with that type. It would be nice to allow the ability to create additional contract types so that if I only want to display results from MSPs, ISPs, and other business channel relationships, I have the flexibility to not only create the form/format I want the data collected in, but the ability to filter those results exclusively. I could use the advanced search but I don't want to create a host of custom fields in the default contract types otherwise it becomes convoluted when building contract assets.
3. Scripting still doesn't have a "better" advanced scheduler. For example, I may only want to schedule a script or task to run once against one machine at a specific time. I don't want the scheduler to run continuously every x minutes/hours/days/weeks, etc. Significantly important when trying to schedule tasks to run at certain periods of the day without requiring interaction.
4. Still no quick tasks/actions in inventory for agent devices, e.g. reboot, release/renew, force logout, etc. I do see that there are some "additional actions" features but it looks like it pertains to mobile devices which is odd considering mobility was removed from the K1K in version 5 or 6 - so that is interesting.
5. No expanded vendor support from Dell though I have to assume this is planned or coming since the acquisition by Quest. It would be nice to see support for HP/Lenovo/Toshiba, etc.
Features or enhancements I dig
1. Contracts, yes I did gripe about this a bit but I love the idea. I currently use custom assets to handle contracts but I love the expanded functionality the new assets provide. I just wish there was extra flexibility.
2. User archiving - this has been a long time coming. I'm tired of micromanaging user accounts in the kbox.
3. WYSIWYG editor for the KB with HTML support. I played around with this briefly and it greatly enhances the KB. While it's not as flexible as some other apps or KB systems, it's a great general improvement over the previous version.
4. The new asset management dashboard seems promising, though it's hard to say how it may actually work after upgrading. At a glance, it looks nice in the sandbox appliance.
So what are others thoughts about v8? I have my gripes (mostly petty) and actually the biggest is the new theme, but overall I'm content with the product. It seems to be growing albeit slowly.
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Posted by:
scarpent
6 years ago
I volunteered to do BETA testing for them and yes are users don't like the new bright white but Quest said that this was put in place for users to be able to pick themes.
2. I like the contract idea it could use other options but it works for us
3. WYSIWYG for the KB articles is so much better than what it was in the past.
4. The dashboard worked for us during the BETA testing phase in fact I just upgraded to the latest 8.0 version that they have out and the dashboard is working just fine.
5. I like the new Wake on Lan feature because now we can do wake on lan relay and use our Kbox extenders to send out the wake on lan request and we have better results.
6. We had a few bugs that we found in the BETA testing but those have been fixed in the latest version that we upgraded to last week and we haven't found anything else that isn't working.
7. I do wish that they would do changes in a more timely manner and some of the items they have public to everyone I am not sure why they would do this. Example the customer satisfaction survey is visible by all and you can't block others from seeing it. I don't think that this is a good morale booster for employees to be able to view.
8. I don't like that because we want to copy information from parent to child tickets used in a work flow this keeps us from using the parent/child relationship for outages because the customer contact information and problem copies from the parent to all other child tickets because you can't distinguish from parent tickets used in a work flow. I don't like that comments can't be copied from parent to child.
9. I still think that they spend more time looking at how to enhance the inventory piece rather than the ticketing piece. Clients buy the whole package and the inventory piece is very nice but the ticketing system I think needs more focus put on it and more than one upgrade a year for enhancements.
10. I would like to be able to have multiple departments use the same queue but not see anyone's tickets but their own in the admin portal. I don't want to manage multiple queues and should not have to. Your too limited in the user portal for technicians in other departments to not use the admin portal.
11. I would like to use the SLA's but I want SLA's by categories not by priority. I don't want to have to create a ton of categories to be able to use the SLA's.
12. I would also like to see customization that if a category is picked then the questions the clients have to answer are what we set up to be for that particular category only.
13. Overall I do like the new version and having the K1000 and the K2000 has allowed us to operate being understaffed due to cutbacks and has decreased our sneakernet.
Comments:
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You raised a few valid points which I think at some point I became complacent to. The service desk needs extreme TLC. Better work flows, better form collection properties, less transparency between queues, better email handling and routing - e.g. remove signatures. I wouldn't mind seeing better notification options as well. For example there's a notification for both ticket on close, comment, and resolution. You add a comment, you add a resolution, and then you close a ticket - you get slammed with notifications unless you disable them. It would be nice to see enhanced notification properties to prevent that - or even balloon notifications sent to the parties documented asset/pc with accompanying agent notifying them of a status change. The customer satisfaction form is a joke imo, and I've never used it. I wouldn't mind that feature being removed or rebuilt from the ground up.
Definitely work to be done, excited by the new release but also hoping that the themes come sooner than later. I can't stomach the new one. - rrjustin 6 years ago
Posted by:
scarpent
6 years ago
I definitely think that they need to work on better notifications and not having to use a custom ticket rule.
We keep getting high percentages of Krash upload when we are getting slammed with tickets and I have been told it is due to rules running on ticket save.
Hoping that they leave asset management and inventory alone for awhile and start paying more enhancements to the ticketing system and how it functions.
Good Luck with the new version
Posted by:
anonymous_129525
6 years ago
A quick note on the new bright theme:
I had my HelpDesk guys who were bothered by this use one of the following Chrome extensions as a workaround solution for now: Color Change or Care Your Eyes.
I particularly like Care Your Eyes night mode. I'm sure there are similar extensions for Firefox.
Hope that helps until they provide a way to change themes.