Aagon ACMP digs very deep for client details

Aagon's ACMP gave us a basic set of desktop management functions, but the tool lacked a number of significant features. As we explored ACMP, we found no support for initial operating system deployment and configuration, no vulnerability threat analysis and no intrusion-detection capability. Moreover, ACMP's network discovery feature sometimes missed clients it should have seen and also exhibited an awkward administrator user interface.

ACMP's modules include ACMP Pro, the base client management component, SWdetective, which performs software inventory and license management and AVdetective, which controls third-party antimalware products.

ACMP's agents did an excellent and accurate job of enumerating a wealth of detail regarding each client that it did in fact find on the network. The resulting asset inventory would've put a smile on the face of even the most critical company auditor. ACMP's distribution of software applications and application and operating system patches, along with its monitoring of licenses, made quick and painless work of ensuring that each client had the right version of each application and that each client was licensed to run that software. ACMP also did a good, consistent job of ensuring that each desktop PC had the screen, registry and application configurations that we chose to enforce across the network.

Its remote control feature was a delight to use, and, for the sake of security and simplicity, it even let us optionally hide our remote-access command sessions from the foreground user. However, in terms of the other features we were hoping to see in this class of products, ACMP lacks virtual machine management, backup and restore capabilities, and mobile USB device management.

ACMP's security monitor component successfully tracked the antivirus activities of products from F-Prot, FSecure, McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro. ACMP started and stopped F-Prot, McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro AV services, and its ability to distribute antivirus configuration settings worked only with Symantec's Endpoint Protection product.

ACMP allowed us to create named groups and put users into these groups in whatever ways we wanted. ACMP uses a container metaphor to denote the groupings of users.

For virtually every operation we wanted to execute in the central console, ACMP forced us to first perform a query. The query, which thankfully we could save from operation to operation, produced the list of clients we could work on. This paradigm was an awkward and unproductive obstacle to managing our clients. Furthermore, sorting on-screen report columns involved dragging and dropping the column header into a special screen area rather than simply clicking on the column header. To its credit, we were able to delegate specific ACMP administrative tasks to particular users.

Installing ACMP's agents on client machines is accomplished by using the central console's "push" feature or by visiting each client to individually run an agent installer. The "push" feature worked well for NT-based operating systems (NT/XP/2000/2003/Vista), but it required that the central console have successfully identified the target client PCs via the client discovery function. For Windows 95 and 98, inserting entries into login scripts worked best.