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KACE KBOX 1000 Series (v3.1)
by Bob Kelly

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More stuff (in brief)

Far too much to cover in these few pages, I recommend seeing for yourself. But rather than just leaving it at that, here are a handful of other cool things I wanted to point out:

  • There is a fairly robust help desk feature which supports the opening of tickets via email or (as you'd expect) using a web form on the KBOX. It's fields are customizable and it offers escalation rules making it more than a rudimentary helpdesk implementation.
  • A knowledge base system is also provided for publishing info to help users to help themselves. You can also limit access to articles so that you can show some to users and some only to administrators.
  • There is an MSI wizard provided to help you create MSI deployment jobs (though the wizard does not filtering for only MSI files, so you'll need to know which are Windows Installer setups and which are not).
  • Remote Control integration – at this point, remote control is not provided a service of the client. Instead, the KBOX provides integration points so that you may deploy your remote control solution of choice and easily trigger it at key locations within the KBOX management console. UltraVNC is bundeled with the KBOX and to make things even easier, one of the wizards provided under Scripting > Configuration Policy is a UltraVNC Wizard. This wizard helps you easily deploy this popular freeware remote control utility.
  • There is no bandwidth throttling, but you can specify a threshold for how many clients may connect to the KBOX at a time. BITS is supported for client downloads (off by default, but can be turned on in XML settings file at client)

Worthy of more than a simple bullet here is support for multiple sites. As a system intended for small to mid-sized networks, I was not very surprised when I was told there was no inherent support for implementing more than one KBOX and having them communicate via WAN links. However, I was surprised to hear that there was considerable thought (and a cost effective solution implemented) in place of a multi-server configuration: Sites may be defined (again with labels) and you may optionally provide a alternate share location for accessing the binaries that would normally be associated with software or   patch distributions and script dependencies. This way, you can have one KBOX and any remote sites communicating over WAN links, could look locally to access the payload for high-bandwidth tasks such as software deployment. Further, KBOX provides support for "Replication Shares" which allow a KBOX Client to replicate to a share for this purpose.

Closing

The KBOX is a very impressive solution and offers a great deal of functionality in a intuitive management console. It clearly goes a long way to helping small to mid-sized environments with a minimal, moderately technical staff, enjoy the management benefits that are more commonly associated with large enterprise environments that have a staff of senior engineers. Just managing similar systems can be a full time job, and from there the value that is enjoyed from having it is heavily dependant upon the talent of the administrators who work with it. Here, the KBOX does well to reduce the complexity of scripting, software deployment and remote client management. While I’m sure that it will be a selling point for may, I've not even discussed the fact that this it is actually an appliance solution: just plug the server in (with no real installation necessary) and no new server need be set aside to handle its load. Even with this strong benefit intentionally omitted from this review, KBOX is clearly a serious contender for your management solution due to what it does (more than what it is).

Bob Kelly
AppDeploySM
2/24/2007

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