Hi Johan,

The Control Suite is a desktop application that sits on top of multiple web services, APIs, and WMIs such as SQL Server, IIS, the Plesk Control Panel, Microsoft DNS Server, Parallels Business Automation, SmarterMail, Kayako Support Suite, DotNetNuke, and quite a few more..  The control suite itself is used directly on the servers that it manages though remote desktop by either people like our support team when we're supporting our shared customers (for example, doing things like retrieving forgotten host passwords), or for our dedicated server customers which may use it for doing things like installs, upgrades, clones, and portal extractions.  Shared hosting customers do not get direct access to the Control Suite, but they do get Plesk Panel access which gives them some of the basic features of the Control Suite.  Of course, everything is always possible, but it would be extremely hard for us to implement advanced tasks like DotNetNuke Clones and DotNetNuke Portal Extractions through a web GUI.

For us, the reason that we chose to implement it as a desktop application is because of the sheer complexity of the tasks that it can handle.  For example, with the migrate feature, which is one of the simpler tasks, I can feed teh control suite a .BAK database backup and a folder that has a copy of a DNN install and it will handle restoring the DB into SQL server, connecting the SQL permissions, copying the DNN files into their right places, rewriting the web.config with a new connection string, optimizing the web.config for our standard best-performance values, attaching a tempoary domain in IIS, adding that tempoary domain as appropriate portal aliases, and then reflecting all those configuration changes though the Plesk Panel - that's a lot of stuff!

The control suite is only available to dedicated server and enterprise customers.  Not every dedicated server customer has the control suite (it isn't in every package we offer), but I'd say a good 95% of our customers do have it so it is usually in the packages our customers buy.