I'm a sys admin at Walker Consultants. Pretty much have had the K1000 for a little over three years now.
We work with Autodesk and some other big, heavy programs where we need to replicate out to our different offices. We currently have just around 20 different offices across the US and overseas in Dubai.
My position with the company is I'm a desktop specialist. I oversee some of the scripting and deploying with KACE with the SMA.
And then I also am responsible for setting up new machines. So we recently have acquired the SDA and are looking to get that up and running to make my life a lot easier.
The people that worked where I'm at now at Walker, they pretty much just had a file share, and then they would manually install all their programs. They currently have 72 different programs that they use. And with being hired at the consulting firm, I've actually been able to automate every single program that they have, which has been extremely nice and saved a lot of time.
By being able to automate and quickly get these users up to date on software and running properly, KACE allows us to do that effectively across all of our offices, as well as those remote users that don't come in.
I pretty much relied on any kind of help from the ITNinja website, which was really great. I've been able to pretty much ask any question and get an answer pretty quickly, like an own little KACE family.
Yes, I've definitely gotten my weekends back. KACE has saved me time.
Just with the use of smart labels, labels in general, no one's really asking me how the software's deployed. KACE box pretty much handles everything automatically. I have monthly reports go out to all my technicians, any open tickets, how did they meet the SLAs for the month.
We have moved to Windows 10. It's been great. No mishaps whatsoever. So Windows 7, Windows 10, perfect, flawless.
Security is definitely a big concern, especially in today's world. I mean, you can barely turn on the news nowadays without hearing about some company getting hacked or some phishing attempts going on. And it's a big concern with everything being connected to the internet.
Personal quote from my boss, my CIO, "You're always either going to be hacked, or you haven't been hacked yet." And we'd like to put them at ease with the K1000 and showing that everything, patching-wise, is up to date, everyone's software, and everyone has an anti-virus. And with the KACE reporting, I can easily pull that. And now with the dashboard widgets, it's even better.
What I love about KACE is being able to effectively manage our 20 plus offices that are spread throughout the country, including one in Dubai, as well as all of the remote users that we have that might not ever even set foot in an office. We're able to effectively manage those systems and keep track of them, as well as being able to deploy software out to them in a timely and effective manner.
And I can't imagine what I would do without KACE, wouldn't be able to handle all of that.