Michael’s note: Please don’t confuse ManageEnginge Desktop Central with the Desktop Central Free Windows Tools. Also read my review of ManageEngine Desktop Central 6. The enhancements of ManageEngine Desktop Central 7 are listed below.
- FREE: File Permissions Check – Compare folder and file permissions - Fri, Feb 20 2015
- FREE: ABC-Deploy – Software deployment and inventory - Wed, Apr 16 2014
- FREE: AD Permissions Reporter – View Active Directory permissions - Fri, Feb 7 2014
Submitted by Ananth
Desktop Central automates regular desktop management activities like installing software, patches, and service packs to client computers, standardize the desktops by applying uniform configurations such as wallpapers, shortcuts, printer, etc., secures the client computers by restricting USB, applying security policies, etc., and enables auditing the network systems with complete hardware/software inventories, license compliance details, detecting prohibited software usage in network systems, etc.
In simple terms, it helps administrators to automate, standardize, secure, and audit their windows network.
The limitation of the Free Edition is that up to 25 computers can be managed and that some of the granular reports on Active Directory will not be available. You can find a comparison table of the different editions here.
New features in ManageEngine Desktop Central 7
- Distribution Server introduced to reduce the bandwidth consumption in managing computers across WAN - This feature is available in Enterprise Edition (newly introduced).
- Role based administration introduced. You can define roles specifying the modules and access levels, which can be delegated to users.
- USB Device Management has been included.
- Desktop Central internationalized to manage computers running non-English version of operating systems.
- Support for Windows 2008, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and 64-bit included
- Power Management Reports has been introduced.
- Ability to create Custom Reports has been included.
- Automatic Patch Deployment enhanced with the ability to define multiple tasks.
- Install / uninstall silent switches of popular software now comes pre-filled in Software Deployment.
- Option to automatically uninstall the prohibited software from the managed computers has been included.
- Support for viewing Remote Desktops from Firefox 3.0 and above has been included.
- Support for applying user configurations when you switch from one user to another has been included for Windows Vista and Windows 2008.
- Support for deploying patches for Non-Microsoft applications has been included.
