Searching for a simple solution

Managing a diverse fleet

As one of the top fifty privately held property management companies, Aspen Square prides itself on transforming neglected apartment complexes into welcoming communities.

To that end, the company relies on a small IT team to manage and support about 550 Windows devices across 70 locations in 15 states. Alex Leloup is the system administrator on the team, overseeing infrastructure and cybersecurity.

Aspen Square had an imaging solution in place, but it wasn’t cutting it.

Not only was Alex left to chase down driver packs to support his diverse fleet, but the team found the software didn’t work consistently, wasn't user friendly, and lacked adequate support. 

“We were using KACE before and it just had constant problems — constant issues during the imaging process,” said Alex.

This came as no surprise to Alex since he’d also used KACE at a previous job and found it to be an older software that wasn’t very intuitive. Challenges getting sufficient support only compounded the issues.

“KACE was not user friendly at all. It definitely had a pretty steep learning curve to it. And the support was not good either, so it was a challenge.”

Going with imaging software that actually works 

Coming off a negative experience with their previous imaging solution, the team needed something that functioned as intended. Alex noticed that SmartDeploy was very highly rated and decided to implement it. 

“We picked SmartDeploy because we were just looking for any kind of good imaging solution that was simple to use. Just clean — it worked.” 

Saving time and improving consistency with SmartDeploy 

Alex’s team images an average of 5 to 10 devices per week. While Alex builds and maintains the image, the help desk deploys it. But after a little up-front work, Alex has been able to take a mostly hands-off approach. 

"It just works, so there really hasn’t been a need for me to have to hop in and reconfigure stuff." 

And putting in the effort early has reaped countless benefits for Aspen Square’s IT team.

Uniform OS imaging even with different hardware 

Running around trying to find the right drivers is a thing of the past. Now, Aspen Square distributes consistent images with ease. 

“Just the uniformity of the images that we're rolling out, the ease of use with being able to download the driver packs for any kind of new machines that we bring on — it's just very simple to use.” 

Flexible deployment options 

SmartDeploy makes it painless for the Aspen Square IT team to build images by job function so that users get the software they need to do their jobs.

Alex also leverages SmartDeploy’s flexible deployment methods. Since Aspen Square doesn’t have significant reimaging needs and most computers ship from the home office, he usually deploys images with USBs. That said, the remote tool has come in handy for imaging a handful of off-prem machines.

Streamlined IT operations 

SmartDeploy has helped the Aspen Square team slash the time it takes to image a machine, making the process quick, easy, and scalable.

“With KACE, it would take sometimes 3, 4 hours to image a machine,” said Alex. “Buggy, slow — compared to Smart Deploy, which will image a machine in 30 minutes. It's a big difference.” 

SmartDeploy and PDQ Connect: Better together 

Aspen Square started its PDQ journey as a SmartDeploy customer, later adding PDQ Connect to its tool kit. Alex and his team soon realized that using the two products together improved the uniformity of their fleet. According to Alex, this got all of Aspen Square’s devices “on the same page, both from an imaging standpoint and updates to the software.” 

Not only are devices more consistent, but Alex and his team now have less work on their plates. 

“It’s nice because with the Active Directory options in SmartDeploy, you can drop the machines directly where you want them. So once you have it set up well, it's just plug and play, and the machines get dropped into the right OUs. They have all the right software. Combined with PDQ Connect, the second a machine is online, it gets updated with everything.” 

“I feel like you guys just kind of hit all the marks.”