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Inventory

The inventory comes with a large database of files it can identify. Obviously you can add to this, but this large database gets you off to a great start by including information on many common commercial applications.

Asset reports (click here for a screen shot) are a very valuable feature taking advantage of Inventory data. You can select a single machine, a group of machines or all machines and generate asset reports. There are quite a few provided asset reports, and if you select one that requires a specific vendor, user, application, etc. – it presents you with a dynamic tree-view of valid responses. This is a great feature when I think to similar systems that simply provide a text box to type into, and you hope you get it right. The report is created based on your criteria and you can double-click items to generate a secondary report on that item. Finally, the reports may be exported to a Crystal Reports (.rtp) file, a PDF document, an Excel spreadsheet, a Word document or a rich text document (.rft).

Also taking advantage of this Inventory data is the ability to create Queries, which you may use as collections/groups of machines for reporting or management tasks. Any of the information available may be used as a condition of the query you are creating and a very helpful feature is provided which optionally presents a returned set of values for the selected item. See image at left.

Remote Control

Remote control also looks very good. A nice log view at the bottom of the screen documents everything. You can perform any of the actions you would expect from an enterprise remote control utility: chat, file transfer, reboot, and remote execution (which is provided as a very handy toolbar drop-down option that remembers previous commands you have executed). There is another drop-down list that allows you to switch between other active remote control sessions. Rather than filling your screen, the remote client desktop is presented in a resizable window which limits your current view based on the window size. When you move your cursor to the bottom or side of the desktop and there is room to scroll- the cursor turns to an arrow and easily scrolls the view accordingly (with varying speed based on your proximity to the edge of the window). At the same time, you do not loose any real estate to the far less accessible scroll bars you would see in a standard window to small to present its contents.

Performance settings allow you to suppress the client desktop wallpaper and color depth may be reduced using a slide control, which allows you to adjust the color resolution in order to affect the speed of your remote control session. In testing, the 10 Mbps LAN speed provided a responsive experience with negligible lag time.

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