Future development of Desktop Authority!!

We're currently looking into renewing our Desktop Authority contracts. Looking at the updates and the recent development at Dell's software departure, I'm quite uncertain if this is actually still worth it. There are MANY things missing in Desktop Authority right now:

- Support for Office 2016 is missing, many things can't be configured 

- Even though Windows 10 is supported, many options for a remote system are missing. Why do I need to run a tool like XP Antispy (among others) to configure the OS?

- Remote Assistant is totally unusable right now. Even with the hotfix installed, no recent browser properly supports the Java applet any more - this has forced us to invest several thousand dollars into teamviewer licenses, even though we originally purchased a software for this purpose!

- We've tested the anniversary update with Desktop Authority and ran into issues with USB security and the complete agent (crash at startup)

Is there any word on the future development? In it's current state and looking at half a year without any updates, DA is certainly not worth it and there are better alternatives out there. However, switching systems comes with a high amount of work and costs so we'd like to stay with our current solutions.

Thanks and regards,

  • First let me thank you for being a valued Desktop Authority customer. And also thank you for caring enough to post your concerns on this forum and reaching out for assistance from our community of peers.

    Desktop Authority Management Suite (DAMS), while under previous management, had multiple re-packaging and de-investment decisions made to focus on more hardware-centric strategies.
    As we separated to form an independent software company, DAMS moved with us.

    Earlier this year, we determined that the aforementioned DAMS strategy did not align with our vision and was not meeting the needs of our customers. As such, we took the last 6 months redefining production in preparation for better development and delivery of these products.

    While that doesn’t give you new features quickly, we are working to fix some of the challenges created and improve the roadmap overall.

    If you haven’t already opened a support ticket on the items you’ve listed, we encourage you to do so, as we are prioritizing current backlog as well as going through ideation process for future features.
    If you would like to discuss further, please reach out to us via the KACE Product Management mailbox at KACEProductMgmt@quest.com.

    Thank you for your patience and we look forward to bringing you more within the products.

    Best regards,
    KACE Product Management