KACE Desktop Authority 11.1 - ExpertAssist User Guide

Reboot

When you click on Reboot under the Computer Management object, you will see the following reboot options. There are five choices.

Restart ExpertAssist Restarts the ExpertAssist services. It does not reboot the remote machine. This is useful if you change settings like the listening port and have no physical access to the machine in order to restart the service.

Normal Reboot Closes all processes and reboots the remote machine in an orderly fashion.

Emergency Reboot Does not allow applications and other processes to terminate gracefully, so you might lose unsaved data. Windows will, however, shut down nicely and flush all outstanding file operations to disk. This can be useful if there are hung processes that prevent Windows from shutting down normally.

Hard Reboot Reboots as quickly as possible. This option will not allow Windows to terminate gracefully, so you might lose unsaved data. This may help if the remote computer hangs. Since rebooting is immediate (just like pressing the reset button) you will not receive any feedback from ExpertAssist when clicking this button.

Scheduled Reboot This allows you to schedule a date and time to automatically reboot the remote computer which you are currently managing. This is useful if the reboot is not urgent and can take place during off-peak hours.

Monitor Host Screen

On this page you can safely monitor the remote computer’s screen. This allows you to watch what the remote user is doing on his computer without the risk of interfering with the user’s work.

Update Now

Remote computer or a remote user logged into the remote computer can be assigned a number of Group Policy objects.

(For Desktop Authority Manager users) These settings can be much more sophisticated if the remote computer, user, OU where they have a membership group or other Active Directory objects were assigned an action via Desktop Authority Manager. To lessen the load on the computers, both the IntelliSense and the Desktop Authority client component apply their policies on a regular basis with a strictly defined update interval. ExpertAssist allows you to force applications of both types of policies to get them applied to the remote computer or user immediately upon your request.

Group Policy Update

Group Policies are updated on a timed interval. By default, the background refresh interval is set to 90 minutes with a time offset of 0 to 30 minutes. This time offset allows avoiding collisions when several computers could request a Group Policy refresh at the same time. The larger the time offset, the more unlikely the collision in refresh requests and the more the latency.

To force a Group Policy update for both computer and user policies on the remote computer immediately without waiting for an automatic group policy application:

1. Click the Group Policy Update button to refresh local and Active Directory based Group Policy settings, including security settings at the current time. This will force Group Policy settings to re-apply on a remote computer even if there has been no change to the Group Policy settings.
1. (If there are any client-side extensions (such as Software Installation) enabled in any Group Policy Object to be re-applied on the computer) Reboot the remote computer to re-apply client-side extensions (if necessary). Click the Reboot button when the Group Policy is updated.

Computer Settings

In addition to the administrative features available under Computer Management, you can also view and modify a number of settings on the remote machine, from Environment Variables to Automatic Priorities.