Future development of Desktop Authority

Patrick,

- We're in a very similar boat. Remote Assistant is horribly broken and we're already investigating other solutions. But again, it's very expensive to jump this ship.

- I've been a huge DA fanboi for years, but the lack of support is very unsettling. I've been investigating competitor products as well. What solutions are you guys looking at?

I've been trying to work around missing features lately (for example, we've tried Teamviewer for internal support, spread through a MSI package and registry settings), but this leaves me wondering what exactly I should pay a yearly fee for :)

I've asked one of my colleagues to try and work out things within group policies directly ... this works surprisingly good at a very performant and good level, though I'm missing the GUI of Desktop Authority for quick changes (everyone got used to it for years now). There are several tools which help with that though, but I doubt Dell would be too keen on us discussing this here :)

Regards,

  Patrick

In my opinion, if they don't want us discussing it, they should fix it.

We're looking at LogMeIn currently, but it's very expensive. Plus, it doesn't have a good way of telling us which user is logged in at which PC. We use Check SLTrace for that information - which is the only thing DA has going for it.

I've thought about going to GP, but it's just too clunky. We have so many rules now, with so many different validation policies, it would be such a headache to re-do in GP.

But I agree - it's gonna be difficult to justify a renewal on DA if they don't fix their stuff.

Well, I guess they will let us know shouldn't it be a good idea ...

We didn't like LogMeIn either, so we are looking into two products for these functions. GoverLAN is very cool when it comes to remote control ... you type in the name of a user and can immediately see, where he is currently logged in all through AD. Got some issues left here and there, but it has an active development ongoing.

For logon scripting we are testing FastTrack Automation Suite, which is basicly just a GUI for Group Policies but makes copying all our old profiles a lot easier.

Hello, this is Diana from Support.  We greatly value your feedback, it’s very important to us at Dell Software.  A Desktop Authority Product Manager will be responding shortly.

With regard to issue with the Windows 10 update and USB/Port Security, you may find this article helpful:  Continually rebooting after upgrading to Windows 10 (208444)

If this is not the issue you have encountered, please report it to Support if you haven’t already.  You can reach us at 800-306-9329, or create a Service Request at:  https://support.software.dell.com/

Patrick, GastroMIS, and mviselli,

 

This if Fernando Volonte, PM for DA and PM.  As Diana said, we greatly welcome your feedback and I would like to address some of the your major points below.

 

With regard to ongoing Development of DA, development is ongoing and we will be releasing a major release of DA in the very near future (Q3 timeframe) barring any unforseen issues.  In this new release there will be some very exciting new features including support for newer Microsoft platforms, i.e., SQL Server 2016, Outlook 2016, and Office 2016 to name a few.  I don't want to list out everything yet as we're nearing the end of the development/QA cycle and don't want to let any untested cats out of the bag just yet.  :-)

 

With respect to Remote Support Center, we continue to improve on this free add-on (we've never charged for it) to Desktop Authority, but have also found that a significant portion of our userbase simply doesn't use this free add-on which may cause us to reevaluate our strategy relative to RSC.  Stay tuned. 

 

I'm confused as to the comment about waiting a year and a half for an update as we released 9.3 in February and are working very hard to release a major update very soon. 

 

As I believe you may already be aware, Desktop Authority is a very easy to use endpoint management solution that gives you a single, easy to use console (I think GastroMIS mentioned missing the GUI of DA for quick changes) to configure, manage, secure and support each of your user's unique workspace.  Not only does DA complement traditional desktop management it gives you true user environment management for your environments.

 

As mentioned earlier, we welcome the feedback and are open to discussions of this type.  At the same time, please know that the developmment, QA, tech writing, and support teams are working very hard day in and day out to provide you the best endpoint management solution on the market.

 

Best,

 

Fern, Desktop Authority/Priviledge Manager PM

Fernando,

I think his overall point is development is slow. Fixes and updates are taking a very long time. Internet explorer has been out for how long? and there are still several very weird glitches with the GUI for programming the config. Not to mention the UI is very slow.

Per your comment about he Remote Support Center. No one is using it because it is absolutely broken. For over 2 years Java is actively preventing us for being able to use the feature unless we approve exception after exception. I finally built a Exception Site List with all of my workstations in there but now with the latest Java update even that does not work anymore. I have little incentive at this point to use the feature. Either make a decision to fix and improve or remove. It makes the product look very bad. My other comment about the support assist is the horrible use of screen real-estate. On my monitor its almost impossible to see anything on a users workstation unless I go into full screen mode because the crummy border on the top and all of the ridiculous white space. Also its not a free add-on. Its part of the product we purchased and your no longer supporting this part of the product.

So to sum it up. His point is that the products development is WAY behind the curve but finding solutions that include the feature set to replace this are hard but not impossible. I'm pretty close to locating some other product.

-Andy

Couldn't agree more to what Andy said.

Take Office 2016 as an example. It has been releases in September 2015, so it's out for a year. As we are using the Office365 plans, our PCs meanwhile all either automaticly updated or got re-installed with the latest version meanwhile. Desktop Authority doesn't feature Office 2016 support for signatures yet - so this feature is broken for quite some time now.

If you plan in dropping Support Center, that's okay - but it is broken for 2 years now, with Java being harder and harder to use (we had a VM with Firefox 3.6 running in it's last months) and us hoping it would come back. We meanwhile purchased a software nearly as expensive as DA to replace it, not because we wanted to but because we had to.

Regards,

  Patrick

Desktop Authority 10.0 should address the issues discussed in this thread.

• Now supports SQL Server 2016, Outlook 2016, and Office 2016.
• We have added support for Chrome and Edge to both Remote Management module and the DA Admin Console (server-side only).
• The Remote Management tab has been improved to provide an easier and more reliable connection to client machine.

Read more about What's New in Desktop Authority 10

Download Desktop Authority 10.0

DA 10 did nothing to improve the usefulness of Remote Connection. Still requires Java and still a pain to get to work. It was a great tool before the Java Wars. But it has caused us to investigate other means of remote support. For example Bomgar, TeamViewer and others.