What do you think of Impero? Using it in school very shortly?

[connor_ict]

Were rolling out Impero very soon would just like to know what the thoughts are of people who have or who are using it within schools for example

The pros/cons?

Edited October 6, 2014 by connor_ict

[tronix-web]

Good but buggy.

 

It will be fine with monitoring but any admin work likes patches will not work nicely

 

other problems with GUI is that its quite buggy and needs to run the impero client few times in a day

[connor_ict]

I can imagine their is going to be faults here and there with it, have you used it much during a classroom enviroment?

[Latham]

We moved to it from NetSupport nearly a year and a half ago and we haven't looked back. A few usability issues aside, it's pretty darn good. The room/user organisational groups you can set up work pretty well, and the built in policy manager helps a lot when blocking some sites (particularly game sites that have many sub-domains - you can block the main domain in the URL and it'll nuke them all. Godsend). The logging of activities is quite detailed (not fully thorough, but enough to help figure out what people have been doing when required to investigate computer mis-use).

 

What I love about it though, are that it helps reduce a lot of repetitive tasks. You can send command line commands as an admin when staff/students are logged in, deploy msis very efficiently and the best part I've started using - the MIMIC Scripts. These allow you to send commands to a whole lot of PCs at once. It helped a lot when installing software to a whole venue that requires a lot of hitting the "next" button.

 

The support is amazing. I need to point that out. I've not had a bad experience. They will help out as much as possible and pretty much hound you until you admit that you're satisfied with a support call, which makes a change with some companies who seem to forget you exist!

 

Cons? There's always a few odd niggles, like the ability to use the keyboard to select text whilst holding the shift key, and having to toggle the "Video Overlay" setting first before the remote controlled screen display gets a responsive refresh rate (and the end user's screen will flicker when controlling - which means convert monitoring is non existent).

[timbo343]

ACE!!!

[Latham]

Good but buggy.

 

It will be fine with monitoring but any admin work likes patches will not work nicely

 

other problems with GUI is that its quite buggy and needs to run the impero client few times in a day

 

Sometimes I need to restart the services on my machine as the console gets a bit laggy at times - but I've put that down as a Windows 8 issue (other technician and my manager are on Win 7 and they don't have to do that at all).

[howartp]

ACE!!!

 

What he said!

[synaesthesia]

Invaluable. Worth every penny. As above, a few little niggles but the time it saves us is immense. Our impero server (Virtual host) died this morning and damn we're missing it!

Probably one of, if not the, best investment we've made. Teaching staff love making use of it for classroom control, screen control/broadcasting etc, and we love it for remote support, logging, e-safety, filtering, pushing out the odd MSI, mimic scripts, the list goes on. And they keep adding to it.

[MatthewL]

In all the schools I work in and out of and have this there is not a bad word out there about it. Everyone loves it.

[RichCowell]

We've been using it for several years now, and love it... myself and my technician both use it all the time for remote management and bulk actions over the network... The IT Teachers use it for monitoring etc. too

 

We don't use all the features - only because we've not needed to so far, but what we have used has all been fantastic, I'm quite happy to sing its praises all day long...

 

Their support is second to none too... they're always really helpful and get issues resolved quickly...

 

I'd be happy to talk more about it and answer any questions you may still have... PM me if you do

[Alkaline]

Good when it works, but at times buggy.

 

It has always been buggy.

 

But it works and the support will help you with any issues.

[SteveM555]

By far the best product on the market for remote administration. The GUI seems fine to me, haven't seen much lag.

 

However, we do have 1 issue that support wasn't able to resolve - Only 80% of PCs will actually Disable Internet or Lock Screen....

[howartp]

I think the only bug we've ever experienced here is with broadcasting a students PC to the rest of the class; it instead broadcasted to the whole school.

 

This was fixed in the recent update.

 

We bought Impero less than a year into a 3-year contract with NetSupport, and it's paid for itself in usability and management benefits.

[clockend25]

Started using it last year and have just signed up for another 3 years. Like it a lot and certainly helps with all aspects of our network management; support when called upon has been great as well.

[russdev]

Hi

 

Sadly when you get something as large as Impero with lot of legacy code things creep through. Also the low level we operate means we are being very old school and doing things in operating systems that go against the manual . We are working on trying to make sure that less and less gets through and hopefully in last few releases you seen less bugs (sadly always going to get some).

 

Anyway @Alkaline and @tronix_web can I get in touch direct as would like conversation about anything that has bugged (pun intended) you.

 

Russell

[stitch]

I wont bother writing a long post as all of our comments have been mentioned above. We love it here.

[connor_ict]

Thanks everyone for the information, it seems it does have slight bugging problems but what doesnt nowerdays, seems like everyone is very impressed with the program and cant wait to start using it within our school!