Contents
Application Matching. 3
Discovery Phase. 4
Hardware Approval 4
Support for Hardware Model Variances. 5
Virtual Application Support. 5
The goal of application matching is to allow a flexible naming string to be used to define an application so applications that are installed on a target machine can be auto detected. For example "Adobe Reader*" would be able to match any version of Adobe Reader so when the PC is reinstalled, the latest approved version of Adobe Reader would be installed.
The Application matching function will be able to be enabled/disabled via a system setting. When application matching is disabled, the system will operate as it does today. When application matching is enabled, extra validation steps are run to validate the applications and decide if the deployment can continue. The matched applications will be added to the applications defined in the Role/Templates for the deployment.
A new menu item "Application Matching" will be added to the application menu. The default view of this screen will list all the current configured match items showing descriptive name and match pattern. Selecting a row will show the details in the bottom of the screen. The details will show all configurable information. The descriptive name will be a link to edit. Edit will allow you to change any field and set the application(s) that are installed when this pattern is matched. There will also be a new link under the list of applications.
Matched applications will have an install action defined with the application. The install action will define what to do when the application is found on the machine. The actions will be Ignore (do not install), Warn (do not install but add to warn list), Abort (abort the deployment), and Install (Install the matching application). A system default will be able to be set as the default action if an application match is not found.
During all deployments in the validation phase, if there is an existing OS, the existing OS will be searched for installed applications using the registry. The values found in the registry will be compared against the application list. All found applications will be processed before any action is taken. After all applications are processed, if any Abort applications are found, the deployment will stop with an error of "Deployment Stopped due to Abort Applications". If any Warn applications are found, the deployment will continue. Both the Warn and Abort application list will be visible in the validation screen for the computer.
This functionality can place ISO's in a greater risk for failed deployments as application availability is restricted to applications selected for the ISO. To help assist this functionality and mitigate risk to ISO's, and additional option will be added to the ISO creation screen where a user can override the "Automatic Application Matching" function if it is system enabled. If this override is selected, application matching will be disabled during the ISO deployment.
A new Application Matching/Setup application (one-click deploy) will be created to pull data from sync list and/or SCCM/SMS ARP list. This application will allow for configuration and maintenance of the application matching function.
No new reports will be created with this feature.
The goal of the discovery phase is to add a new function to Encore where the system can detect current settings of a computer and then use these settings as part of the future state. The short term goal is to eliminate the fields that are used in the Computer Future State Template to setup the one off settings. The long term goal of this phase would be to determine settings of a machine so a deployment could be created by just picking a computer and in a break fix the rest of the settings are auto detected and the computer could be rebuilt with no further action.
For the first phase, we will be detecting Login Domain, DNS Domain, Location, Organizational Unit, and installed applications. Installed Applications are defined in the Application Matching section.
The discovery phase will be able to be run as an independent Encore process, like Validation. It will also be run at the start of each deployment. Discovery will be able to be enabled/disabled via a system setting.
A new T-Action will be added called Discovery. This will allow just discovery to be run on a computer prior to deployment.
The last set of discovery information will be stored with the computer record and displayable on the Computer Details display (via a new tab).
On templates, fields that can be found via discovery will include a checkbox named "Auto if possible". This will allow the discovery value to override the value set in the template. This field will not be additive (the highest value wins) but will only be used on records that contain a value. If the combination of all templates results in a field with no value and that value can be detected, auto if possible is assumed true and the detected value will be used.
Swimage Encore presently does not provide a mechanism for the Administrator to enforce to which hardware models an operating system can be deployed. This hardware approval feature enables operating system type to hardware model enforcement.
Swimage Encore uses a concatenation of the hardware manufacturer and model name (herein referred to as ‘Description’ or ‘make’) from the system BIOS to uniquely identify hardware for driver installation. Some OEM’s such as HP and IBM however add additional information or use different model names to indentify variances (such as processor speed) in the model, which however do not require different hardware drivers. In such cases, Swimage may have several hardware records that use the same drivers. This makes it cumbersome for the Swimage administrator to manage drivers. The proposed support for hardware model variances will address this problem by introducing search expressions.
A Swimage administrator will be able to define a search expression for an existing hardware record, causing new or existing hardware models that match the search expression to use drivers associated with the specified hardware record. New hardware records that match the search expression will not be added into Swimage as independent hardware records, but rather as a property of the existing record whose search expression they match. It will be the administrators responsibility to delete any existing hardware records that match the search expression.
Note: This design does not allow the administrator to manually associate one hardware record to another. All associations are determined by the search expression.
The goal of the Virtual Application Support is to allow Swimage Encore to be able to install Virtual Applications as if they were a normal application. We will be supporting Virtual Applications that are controlled via Active Directory membership and SCCM Collection membership. Virtual applications will be able to be added manually, via a AD sync, and via a SCCM sync.