[MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Andrew Eatmon. I am a IT Technical Support and Network Specialist. And I work for Hospice of Marion County in Central Florida.
Our company is structured in a primarily field-based way. Most of our nurses are working out in the field in patient homes. They're recording that data, providing care, and then having to sync that data back up to our system, our server and our network.
We also provide inpatient unit services. So we're one of the largest hospice inpatient units, which, again, provides another level of multisite configurations that we have to manage. We have different VLANs from different sites, so it puts a lot of hurdles on us as a company to be able to do that with our level of infrastructure.
Some of the challenges we face as a smaller team supporting a larger user base is just being available. The other thing we have is our other problems we run into is we are located at our admin building. So when all of our users are field users, how do we help people that are 45 minutes away from us? They can't just come in and see us. So being able to make it to those more remote areas in a timely manner can be difficult.
At first, I didn't like the KACE product. I'll be honest. It was totally different. The more I use it and the more capabilities I see that KACE can offer us-- ticket processes. I'm really excited for ticket templates come in 10.
When I get back, we're updating. I said, we got to do this. The more I use it, it's such a well-designed product once you get into it and you understand. And I think that was hard for me, is it was a little overwhelming when I first started picking it up. Now that I've been using it for the last year, I'm really excited to see what it can do. I've really started delving into how it all plays together.
We currently use the KACE SMA. We also use Desktop Authority. I've been very excited after this conference to see how those two can really work together to fill the voids that I've been having.
The primary way that we use Desktop Authority right now is we push printers. So we have a lot of mobile users that are at different sites. And we can easily push a printer to somebody, call up, hey, I need to print here. No problem. It's there, done. I don't have to walk them through installing it themselves.
The other thing we use it for is shortcuts. We have a lot of web-based applications. And our user base is not-- they want it to be easy. They don't want to have to type stuff in or create their own shortcut, so we can do that for them, help manage it, and know, OK, when a new person comes into finance, they're going to get these shortcuts right here on their desktop.
And one of the best things that we've been able to use KACE for is we have a VDI environment. Our nurses need to be able to chart in their inpatient units at the nurses station. But they also need to bring that desktop basically with them into the medroom. They need to be able to do stuff in real-time.
Well, that creates a problem because we have one server for our VDI pool for multiple locations. So how do we assign printers? What logic do we use? And Desktop Authority actually allows us to do that. We can drill down on the MAC address or the subnet of where that machine is to know to assign the correct printer. So they can do that.
I mentioned earlier that we use primarily mobile devices. I need to know why are those machines not checking in. Having that information and knowing that now I can get it is going to save us a lot of money by being able to track our devices but also time by trying to track those things down. I can provide that information up the chain, say, hey, these people need to come in. Where are they? And I don't have to go physically make phone calls and track them down.
How do we use the help desk feature in our environment? Primarily, because of the level of our user base, we are using it so far in a simplistic form. What's the bare minimum of information I can get somebody to put in to give me a ticket, so that I can go back and start to help them? Moving forward, however, I plan on using it to do processes, to onboard new hires, to create different processes, so that we can actually use what it's being used for.
We have a lot of people that come into the organization. And right now that information is not consolidated somewhere in a usable form, and we're going to change that. We're going to expand that.
We're going to use templates, make it even easier on our users to be able to put a ticket in. OK, I have this problem. Here, all the information's right there. They don't have to know. They just have to look.
If somebody asked me if I think they should use KACE products, based on my experience, yes. You may not need everything that KACE is offering. KACE and Quest, they have a large portfolio, from what I can tell, very good, useful tools. You may not need everything. But I would imagine, if you talk to them, you could use and benefit from something.
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