What needs improvement with ManageEngine Endpoint Central?

Sometimes computers fail to receive patches, and we need to investigate why. It would be great if there was a smarter solution to address this issue.

The main issue that needs improvement is the pricing. Additionally, while there are no technical problems, the cost is higher compared to some competitors.

Many features in Desktop Central are licensed separately. It would be more convenient if they could organize these tools into a single package. Instead of requiring users to choose each feature individually, they could offer a package that includes commonly needed tools.

ManageEngine should support various browser features, including those that address browser limitations.

We've discovered that while using it to patch many top applications, especially Microsoft and Java, we don't always get good reports. Even when it shows Java as up-to-date, it might not be. So, to make it better, they should improve the accuracy of Java patch reporting.

The reports provided by the product are an area of concern where improvements are required. The visibility provided by the reports is not very attractive. Primarily, the product offers only chat support. Support via telephone should be provided to users by ManageEngine's technical team.

Improvement should be done as per customer requirements.

The product's remote access manager needs improvement. The wake-up takes longer time, sometimes more than five minutes. It could respond immediately.

Tech support is mediocre at best. You sometimes get someone who knows what they are doing, but most times they trying to find their way around their own system. It really seems like support is just an afterthought. When the support issue gets escalated, it seems like there is no communication between the first-tier support tech and the second support tech, since we've had to re-iterate the entire issue from the beginning to the second-tier support person.

ManageEngine Endpoint Central’s scalability could be improved.

The tool's security can be better.

We are looking for a complete solution for patch management with central management and the cloud which ManageEngine Endpoint Central does not provide.

We'd like more compatibility for Mac in the future. That way, we wouldn't need to use two tools for different computers. The support could be faster. It was a bit expensive.

I don't know if it's ManageEngine fault or not. However, most of their agents that are being used for scanning endpoints and implementing software, and getting interaction from the ManageEngine platform are usually blocked by default by Windows Defender or other security products. Users may run into conflicts with other antivirus or firewall solutions. It requires manual intervention so that users do not receive false positives. You need to manually tell some systems, "this agent is not malware, don't block it." It might be helpful if they offered a simpler way to use the OS deployment function. It's a bit complicated for most of the customers. You have to take some time and create a customized image. Maybe if they had a repository where you can store a Windows image and auto-deploy it, with not so many parameters on how to deploy it, or where to deploy it would be easier. It's overcomplicated for what it is used for.

The OS deployment could be better. Technical support from our local partner is not the greatest. I'm still exploring the solution. There is yet more to uncover. Typically, if anything was missing, I would put in a feature request. However, I have not done that yet.

Each of their products is an independent product, and they don't have anything to do with each other. It is a suite of packages. They all run independently, and they all are a little different because they were acquired differently. They could standardize their portfolio. We found the team that supports us to be very difficult to understand because of their accent.

ManageEngine Desktop Central is very limited. When you scan your system, it will only recognize Microsoft Windows Defender and BitLocker. The warranty period, on Desktop Central only recognizes the Dell. They do not recognize HP and they do not recognize any other brand like ThinkPad.

The team I've currently got is not using it particularly well, due to the fact that they don't know how to use it particularly well. They've not done any training and so on. There are lots of things that need to be done. Hence, why I was looking to whether it's a good product or not, which I think it is. It's a good enough product, yet in terms of the team, they just don't know what to do. I don't know how good it's going to be. That said, it looks like it's going to be perfect for what we want; it just needs to be matured further.

Its licensing should be improved.

The reporting analytics could improve in ManageEngine Desktop Central. However, there are some third-party add-ins or modules you can purchase to do reporting analytics.

The team should work on improving the stability, particularly with massive patches deployment, clients are not 100% getting patches and the information provided by the system does not help; more detailed report would be very useful. ManageEngine should provide a periodic health checks for licensed customers; can be a sharing for best practices, tips or recommendation of critical patches or features the customer may have missed.

For the most part, all of my needs are met with this product. I would like to see them come out with a SaaS version of the product in the future. There are dependencies with on-prem. For example, since it's on my data center, my bandwidth, it is totally dependent on my network. On the cloud, I don't have to worry about anything. One feature we're testing is when we have a laptop with just a DOS OS and we need to do a full installation, including installing the underlying OS. I'd like to have the option where we could create a template to allow the system to install the OS with the typical software. It's a feature we're testing now to see if this is possible. We don't use it yet. However, I'd like it if we could just run one script, one command, and then get an alert when the process is done so that I can go in and configure emails or whatever else I need so that it is ready for the end-user.

One area that could be improved with the solution would be integrations. Sometimes it happens that the agent got corrupted on the systems, and we have to manually uninstall and push it to the systems again. Also, ManageEngine does not recognize systems that are not on our network. For example, one of our employees in another city did not connect his or her laptop to the system for a few months, or just connected to the internet and did not connect to our VPN, so the agent got corrupted or disconnected from our ManageEngine. Then we have to manually ask them to connect to the network. Then we push all the updates. That's the only issue we really face with Desktop Central. So if somehow we could connect it through the internet, that would be a great improvement. Right now, if a user is not connected to the VPN or the network and he's outside the country or city, and when he just connects the internet, ManageEngine does not connect to communicate with our server. Regarding additional features, I had created a lot of tickets for feature enhancement, things which were not available in Desktop Central previously, but were noted by the team, developed by the Desktop Central team, and published. For the last year and a half, and I haven't opened any tickets or seen any additional requirements from our side. Desktop Central is very good software.

ManageEngine could be improved by giving customers an option to perform certain actions proactively. Since I was a consultant, I worked on different products and some had advantages over ManageEngine. For example, proactive remediation—you want to proactively check something on the computers and run the script. In ManageEngine, you have the option to run the script, but Intune has the option to do so proactively. ManageEngine doesn't have this. You should have the option to act proactively, not just going ahead and fixing it once it's done. Proactive remediation should be a feature. Another thing is, with PC provisioning, they have to make it in a modern way. They have deployment, but it's a very outdated process right now. It's a modern workplace, so you have to provision a PC live, on the go—it's not that you create images and then distribute the image to the machines. Many customers are not using this and, in fact, we are not using it. We use a modern way of PC provisioning. So they have to concentrate on that more. There are small glitches, but it's not going to stop you from using the product. For example, when you open the configuration, you may not see the details, but if you refresh the page, you will see them. There are small glitches here and there that we can see.

Technical support could be better. They should increase their hours of availability so that they are easier to reach and it's more convenient for us. The pricing could be a bit better. They must change project management on Service Desk Plus to make it possible to integrate with Microsoft Project on Service Desk Plus and to increase the results on Google maps, on the Mobile Management, so that we can track our mobiles devices. Right now, it's not integrated with Google maps. This is a major issue.

Overall, our experience has not been good. In terms of the software itself, it's just kind of hit or miss as to whether or not it works. I've had to spend a lot of time with their port trying to get to work. Technical support is not reliable. The solution isn't fully stable, and, when it goes down, it's hard to get it up and running. The initial setup is complicated.

The pricing of the solution could be better. The solution should be better at integrating with other solutions. Right now, it's not the best.

I would like to have the option to install the agent remotely. When we change a PC, we have to uninstall the agent and then re-install it on the new one, and it is a difficult procedure. Sometimes the performance is not very good, which is something that can be improved.

There are occasional glitches but they deal with it very quickly and efficiently. They've actually just rolled out a whole new endpoint security add-on that includes the features I've been looking for.

There is a slight delay in customer support, which is something that can be improved. We would like to see more integration on the macOS side, much as it is with Windows. There are still some access-level restrictions that we can see in the latest macOS when we connect desktop central remote. This is something that should be improved in the next release.

The product has several places where there is room for improvement. Although it is on the cloud, sometimes the performance is slower than it should be. One of the reasons could be that it is tightly integrated and tight coupled with the rest of the modules and all of them have to be in sync. This syncing takes time and resources. When I go to our Desktop Central console, sometimes it runs slowly. So performance is one place where it could have room for improvement. In terms of patching, which is a major benefit of the package, patch management can work even better as well. The vulnerabilities are obvious. Every day we get reports on a lot of new vulnerabilities. It is clear that ManageEngine is doing the patching and the package is easily deployed once they are developed and available. The incident management, the root cause, the planning of the resolution, the service management — all these things are known and available. The team at ManageEngine is good at that. But they do not provide reports to user admins on the development and delivery which is information they already have and admins could use. Once the patch is added to the repository the defense against vulnerabilities improves. But the information about developments and vulnerabilities would be good to have and could be shared more candidly.

Not many things are needed for improvement, everything seems to be great as it is. One thing that would be good to have would be the ability to add MDM to a tablet running Android 5.0 using the EMM Token Enrollment. If we wanted to add MDM to an older tablet, we just have to go the "long route" to get it added. I would guess another option would be a lower price cap for using all the separate divisions of programs that are being built withing Desktop Central. We actually opted out of renewing Analytics Plus this last go around because of the cost and the lack of times we actually used it to run reports.

I really feel like asset explorer should be a component of desktop central. That would make it the ultimate desktop management tool. This would also simplify the asset management role since an agent is already being deployed and assets could be added at the same time. the CMDB would be quickly populated with a PC hardware and software inventory along with user relationships. Device assignment and tracking would be another added value. Adding that feature set would tie everything together and be the one-stop-shop of desktop management suites.

We would like to see options for deploying Microsoft 365 accounts into Outlook. For now, we only can use it to deploy exchange accounts. Also, we would like to see an option do decline Windows 7 ESU patches in a bulk. For now, we have to decline them one by one which is not an easy process. Also, we are not clear about uninstalling Desktop Central patches from our server. That is not a problem for now but in the future, it could be. There should be some more clearance on how to uninstall Desktop Central patches and what are the consequences.

Computer imaging is powerful but breaks frequently. The reason for this breaking is not clear and requires heavy amounts of attention to keep operational. There is a lot of room for this tool to do more but the reliability of this process should be focused on first to ensure core competencies are being fixed before more features are added. Support, when a problem happens, is not efficient at responding to problems and resolving issues efficiently. This is difficult because the time when we need this to be at its best is when we are having a problem and this has compromised our confidence in the product because support might not be confident in resolving issues when they come up.

I would like to see more click to complete actions such as - USB lockdown for Mac, the ability to check AV compliance on servers, bit locker controls, printer tracking or print page tracking, self-help for self-healing like "BMC my IT" and more options in the self-service menu other than just software - maybe add integration in ADSelfService at the self-service menu. I would also like self enrolment page for agent-based deployment like that for the MDM or modern management options. A physical location for agent-based machines like on modern management.

The Patch Management functionality needs lots of improvements. The Deployment scheduler needs updating to support various methods for deployment.

We haven't used all the features. The parts that we're using are pretty good. I would like to see them include the ability to find out the network usage but I believe that might be a feature of it already.