Kaseya: Mac Support Here Linux and Smart Phones by December

Kaseya will add support for Intel's vPro and Mac clients as well as provide a new application programming interface to its Kaseya 2008 platform for managed service providers, set to be available at the end of March, the company announced Feb. 29.

And later this year the company plans to introduce support for Linux as well as for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry PDAs. "We are watching Treo too, but there's a lot more Windows Mobile and BlackBerry out there," said Dan Shapero, senior vice president of marketing for Kaseya.

The enhancements are ones that the company's MSP partners have been asking for, he said, and they mark the most significant upgrade of the software to date.

Kaseya 2008 manages machines equipped with the Intel Core 2 processor with vPro, providing MSPs who use it with the ability to work remotely during off-hours and also to control power management settings so that out-of-band machines within Wi-Fi range are turned off when not in use.

To read about how one MSP used vPro to outsource some of his work to India, click here.

"You can go green without compromise," Shapero said. "And after hours is the time when you want to be doing these management functions."

Kaseya has also added on a module called User State Management that harvests user settings and information for machines to help restore those settings after, say, a migration from Windows XP to Windows Vista.  It can also be used in a disaster recovery scenario.  In addition, administrators can use the module to create standard user profiles for office workers or field reps. And it can specify power management settings, Shapero said.

With the addition of Mac OS X support, Kaseya 2008 allows MSPs to manage Mac clients within their customer sites.

"There is always somebody using a Mac," Shapero said. "And it's hard for IT to say, 'I can monitor and manage everything except the Mac.'"

Kaseya will also offer an API as part of its core framework. Previously available only as a patch, the API allows for the creation of custom Windows desktop widgets and alerts to help MSPs better manage their clients' systems.

"Now I can look at all alerts via a little dashboard of widgets," Shapero said.