I did come across a few issues with the new ARD release. While Spotlight searches worked perfectly, and package installation was indeed dramatically faster, I was initially unable to get any reports to work. I tried both ARD 2.2 and 3 clients, without success. This was working in ARD 2. Calls to tech support resolved this issue, and if this happens to you, keep this possible solution in mind: The first possibility is that your network is not allowing communications to be originated from the device back to your task server. Ports 3283 and 5900 need to be open for both UDP and TCP.

In my case, I had a corrupt task server preferences file on the admin server. To fix this, I went to Library/Application Support/Apple/Remote Desktop/Task Server/ and deleted the Settings.plist file. You'll need to su to get in or change the permissions on the folder to do this.

Another possibility if your reports fail is that something is corrupted on the client side. In that case, you do have to physically go to the machine, shut off remote desktop and do a sudo rm- R on /var/db/RemoteManagement/caches/. If that fails, also remove /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ARDAgent.plist from the client machine. Obviously, visiting the client is the last thing you want to do, so try the other solutions first.

Overall, ARD 3 brings this application to the level of other commercially available asset management and remote support applications. Except for the lack of a useful application packaging system -- the included packager is too kludgey and programmer-oriented to be called useful -- ARD 3 is at the level of its more established peers. The now-included SQL database allows for real enterprise-level reporting, the task server allows an admin to offload and schedule tasks and the incredibly low cost for licensing makes this application seriously worth considering for managing more than five Mac OS X desktops.

After I've had some time to use ARD 3 in detail, and can put it to some real-world testing, I'll report back on what I find.