An Open Letter from KACE's Rob Meinhardt

Dear AppDeploy Community,

We are very excited to welcome Bob Kelly and the rest of the AppDeploy community into the KACE family. Rest assured that we're committed to seeing AppDeploy continue to evolve as a free, open and vendor-agnostic community. Furthermore, we do not plan to take over the AppDeploy community and inject KBOX propaganda all over the site.

In fact a major reason for joining forces with AppDeploy.com was to make the extensive content of the AppDeploy community more accessible to KACE customers (more on that in a moment). Therefore, it’s very much in our interests to keep the AppDeploy community free and open, and we have already begun to invest financial and other resources to advance Bob’s work and improve the community.

There are two primary reasons why KACE has acquired AppDeploy:

Benefits of a Universal, Free Application Knowledgebase:
We believe that application deployment and management tasks are too complex and that the AppDeploy knowledge base offers huge benefits to systems administrators everywhere. We'd like to make sure that this knowledge base continues to expand and, for that reason, we are putting additional financial resources behind AppDeploy and we are contributing information on over 60,000 applications that we've catalogued during the last year. We will continue to operate AppDeploy as a free, public service to all systems administrators regardless of the systems management platform that they use.

Opportunity for Product Integration:
In addition, to operating AppDeploy.com as a free, public community, KACE intends to offer KBOX customers a little something extra. Beginning with the next release of KBOX, Administrators will be able access context-sensitive information from the AppDeploy knowledgebase directly from within the KBOX administrator interface. So, when a KBOX user begins to setup an application deployment task for an application like Adobe Acrobat, they'll see context sensitive tips, tricks and best practices from the AppDeploy site right within the KBOX interface. We believe that this will dramatically simplify the application deployment and management processes that KBOX supports. And, because these administrators will be able to post information too, this integration will also serve to broaden the AppDeploy knowledgebase. So, we come in peace. AppDeploy has been an invaluable gathering place for systems administrators for almost ten years. We intend to increase investment in the work that AppDeploy has been doing and we intend to keep the community free and accessible for all.

Also see: Letter from AppDeploy Founder Bob Kelly