We have been fairly idle on our migration since our last training session. Until we had more information on how the groups worked we were not ready to continue. Now that we had training on the groups and templates we have the better part of the missing pieces.
Once again Robert was a fantastic trainer and we had a great Q&A as the last part of the training. We hit him up with some pretty tough questions and he was able to get us great answers on everything.
We are continuing to work on how we will be pulling this all together over the next week and hope to be ready to get a 1000 or so workstations on as a first wave.
A couple things we are still trying to figure out are:
1. Auto-join for groups. Seems simple enough and works well for the initial population, but if a machine falls out of the scope of the search it is not removed from the group. Not a good example, but for instance if you had a search that populated a group based on the OS being Windows XP, then later upgrade the OS to Windows 7, the machine would remain in the Windows XP group AND be included in the Windows 7 group.
This has to be something that we are missing as I couldn't imagine this not working the way we think it should.
2. How to 'stage' new machines. Currently when we on-board a new client we install agents on all workstations and server with certain templates applied that do nothing but collect system information and patch data. We then run reports on this collected data, discuss it with the technical team and the customers for wrap up any details and then we apply our monitor/alert/patch templates. We don't want to just pull the trigger on a network that probably hasn't had proper management since it was setup. Nobody want to blindly release 130 patches on an un-patched server.
We thought we had figured out how we could bring machines into LabTech and have nothing done to them until we moved them into the proper group, but then realized that the searches which do all the work really didn't care if the machines were in a particular group or not. The searches are going to populate the groups as that is exactly what they are designed for. So we need to step back and rethink that strategy.
I am sure that we will have some other items.
DW
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Update on the auto-join issue I *thought* we had. Not sure if it is a bug, but if you use the 'Limit to Search' checkbox for the auto-join option and try to force the group to update with the 'Run Now' button, the group does not update. If you let the system do it in the background it works exactly as we thought it should. I think the background update of the groups is on a 30 minute interval, plenty fast enough for what we need.
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