Apple Remote Desktop

What do you like best?

I like being able to send messages to the screen of the computers I'm administering.

What do you dislike?

I wish that there was a Pro version which had more Enterprise features.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

It's a good program for administering a bunch of Mac computers, but it lacks Enterprise features, like most of Apple's technologies. It would be great if I was able to do a proper wake on LAN command to have a Mac start up without having to physically have someone go push a button. The best work around that I found was to schedule a time where the computer is scheduled to start up on it's own. That's hardly ideal but at least then you have a time you can count on when the Macs will actually be online so that you can do administrative tasks.

I do like that it uses VNC essentially to view the desktops of the computers. This let me use VNC software on other platforms to also connect to and view the Macs that I was administering. It would be nice if Apple would release Apple Remote Desktop on Windows and Linux as well. It also would be nice if you were able to at least have some basic functionality to administer Windows computers or other non-Apple devices from within Apple Remote Desktop, but that's not the case. Apple makes the whole widget, and when you user it as intended it generally works pretty well.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It's a great tool for administering and monitoring a few Mac computers, it works great when you're working with up to a few dozen computers.