Kace Networks KBox 1100 review

The appliance itself doesn’t run the Kontainers as these are farmed out to suitable XP or Vista systems. To test this feature we created a Kontainer for Firefox and pointed the appliance to the installation executable and told it which clients would be hosting it.

We selected systems that could access the Kontainer and the next time their agent contacted the appliance the necessary links were downloaded. As far as local users are concerned they access the application as though running it locally and unless you told them, they probably wouldn’t even know it had been virtualised.

It looks real to the end user but this copy of Firefox is running in a Virtual Kontainer.

Kace provides plenty of good reporting tools and although you get a pile of predefined reports we found custom ones easy to create. A wizard steps through the process where you pick from a wide range of topics and add rules for each selected entry. You don’t need to know anything about SQL query statements but just in case you do, Kace allows you to use these to create reports as well.

With many desktop management software suites in danger of collapsing under their own weight, Kace offers a refreshing alternative. Deployment is a smooth process, the majority of general day-to-day management operations can be easily automated and Kace's Kontainers add a new dimension to the KBox.

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