An Open Letter from AppDeploy.com's Bob Kelly

I cannot express how thrilled I am about this opportunity to take AppDeploy to a new level. The acquisition by KACE means that instead of spending my nights and weekends on AppDeploy, I now have it as my primary on-the-clock mission. I want to stress that the people at KACE want to ensure that AppDeploy prospers and that there is no negative impact to the community. In fact, AppDeploy will now have resources at its disposal that would not otherwise have been realized. You will note while some time and money has already been spent to improve the look of the site, they are not imposing their brand or inundating the site with advertising as they could. I strongly believe AppDeploy will improve in ways that would otherwise not have been possible as a result of this acquisition and I’m excited to see it through.

A community of KBOX users (a very slick management system I am keyed up to work with) has opted in to share information from their software inventories. You will first see this data integrated into AppDeploy in the form of additional details in the Package Knowledge Base. This information will be further exposed in its own section of the site as the Software Knowledge Base (currently on the site in "beta" form). Details include file version information, install strings, uninstall strings, and more for over 60,000 applications. A new type of data for AppDeploy, the Software Knowledge base will also provide category and threat level meta data as flagged by KBOX users in the field. The "category" will help to identify applications as business, undesirable, and so forth, while the "threat level" will help identify unwanted or malicious software on your systems. A way to contribute to this set of data outside the KBOX is already in the works as an enhancement to the AppDeploy Scanner. Today the AppDeploy Scanner may be used to view Software Knowledge Base details specifically for the software found on your computer.

I know I say it often, but my thanks go out to everyone in the AppDeploy community for helping make it what it is today. I started this site almost ten years ago and for the first few years it was only myself contributing and many tried to convince me this was a topic only I cared about. Eventually persistence won out as slowly more with questions and skills to share on the topic of desktop management have found their way here. As I begin to see my hobby become my job, it is my goal that all in this great community will gain more value from AppDeploy over the coming months and years as I work to make AppDeploy better than it ever could have been without the help of KACE. Please join me in thanking KACE for their vital support!

Sincerely,
Bob Kelly
Senior Product Manager, KACE

Also see: Letter from KACE CEO Rob Meinhardt