Having been in the outsourcing market for too many years, I have had my fair share of using RMM products, watching some grow and others dissapear.

Since starting my own business in 2002, we have evolved from a standard remote support offering to a full monitoring service, initially through the logmein group of products.

After being made aware of Centrastage (CS), a huge light popped up, allowing a whole new area of business and revenue to become possible.

With an easy to understand fixed cost pricing, CS allows me to know exactly how much it will cost me to design a process for marketing and then deploying to our clients.

As the product has grown (and continues to) CS had increased vastly in our product range, replacing the multiple resources that we used, down to a few. This I can see being reduced down to just one when the promised updates are completed.

From a single install, you can deploy the agent (or get it to check itself every 30 mins) to all machines on the network.
Scheduled tasks allow you to keep the desktops and servers in trim and to make sure that you don't get support calls for simple tasks such as disk space or speed issues due to heavily defragged drives.

With the implementation of the new com store, this has opened up a whole new world of currently free and in the future paid apps than can be deployed to our clients simply and without any user intervention. A win win if I ever saw one.

With a 3 user trial (which never expires) it allows you to have a play with all the features, with no timeouts or expiry.

For any budding or growing MSP, I would really recommend you have at least a look at CS and see how you can add this to your business portfolio.

We use CentraStage here at Somerset LA for support to Schools based around the County. I've been using it for almost 2 years now and found it to be an excellent tool that assists me in my day to day work.

The whole system relies on a small "CentraStage Agent" being installed on any device you need to support. There is the ability to automatically deploy the agent to any workstation connected to a Domain Controller using the Deployment feature. This feature works flawlessly, but there is also the ability to e-mail a direct link to anyone that allows them to download and install the agent themselves. Once running, the device will automatically populate within CentraStage.

Our primary use is for remote support via RDP/VNC. The ability to connect remotely to any device is tied in perfectly with the CentraStage Agent that sits in the system tray. Innate a VNC/RDP connection from the web interface and within 15 seconds, the Agent has loaded and I'm connected and ready to go. Features include an overview of the device, remote chat and a built in FTP client. You can also get instant access (without having to log onto a device) to the Task Manager, Windows Services & Command Prompt.

We also use CentraStage to perform centrally managed tasks such as upgrades, SQL backups, file & software deployment, scheduled data extraction etc. We used to rely on Scheduled Tasks set up on each server. These proved timely to manage due to the sheer number of devices we supported. Now every task is run centrally using CentraStage. This gives us a real edge in time saving and greatly reducing man hours. CentraStage gives a real time display of running jobs and once completed, provides you with a full detailed list of job results. It also contains customisable filters to allow you to look specifically at devices that have completed the job, failed the job etc.

There are bags more features and I would recommend to anyone that they take the free trial to really experience it for themselves! I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

As a small support company looking af ter the IT of approximately 30 companies time is precious and time management of ten dif f icult. Af ter using NTR (GFI MAX) for 3 years (it w ould have been shorter but NTR used to tie you up w ith a ridiculous contract) we began evaluating Centrastage.

It combines remote control facilities w ith monitoring and job scheduling in a w ay that is totally customisable to suit each client. We have found it to be a fantastic product. Spend a little time creating monitors intelligently and jobs to perform those day to day tasks and you basically have a system that looks af ter itself and automatically performs all of the tasks that would otherwise fill your day.

Development cycle is strong and new features are introduced on a regular basis. Support (if ever needed) is also exemplary. Centrastage has allowed us to take on more customer without increasing staff numbers (something that would have been impossible a year ago) and also allowed us to have our first holiday in 3 years.

Safe in the knowledge that we can respond to technical issues before the client detects a problem from anyw here with an internet connection.