As much as system administrators love what they do, most people just want their software to work so they can do their job. They don't want to call and beg you to come over to their building to perform that update that fixed the problem introduced three updates ago.
They want you to be the Person Behind the Curtain that makes and keeps everything working right. With Admin Arsenal, you can be the unseen wizard of your network: all knowing, all powerful and all helpful without getting between your users and their work.
One of the most powerful abilities Admin Arsenal-equipped system administrators have is they can make sure each and every user on their Active Directory network has precisely the software they need. Here's how Admin Arsenal makes remote deployment a reality:
- Upgrade your users so that they don't have to. With Admin Arsenal, you can plan, target and configure updates and upgrades from relatively simple MSI files through MSUs and MSPs for Windows Vista and Server 2008 to commercially compiled installer executables. What's more, you can take full advantage of each installer's command line flags, such as /silent and /norestart.
- Know, don't guess, that software upgrade worked. Admin Arsenal's agentless scanning capabilities mean you can not only deploy updates from your desk but automatically check all of the PCs that you just updated for error log messages pertaining to that install. If there's a problem, you'll know it before the user does - and that's a good thing.
- Perform magic. Turn a graphic artist into a web developer. Or vice versa. Every day in your organization someone leaves, joins or changes roles. The PC that was running Adobe Creative Studio 4 yesterday needs to become a Visual Studio Team Foundation 2008 box tomorrow. With Admin Arsenal you can remotely create and run batch files and PowerShell scripts, not just perform a single app or patch install or uninstall at a time. Write and run your goodbyeartist.bat remotely with Admin Arsenal and all of the old graphic art software apps on that PC are gone, leaving a fresh box (except for the yellow stickies all around the screen), ready for your dotnetdev.bat file to do its magic.
- Clean installs, without the need to clean up. With Admin Arsenal, remote software installation means the install file(s) are copied to each machine you designated, run with the options you selected and then the install and install temp directories are deleted. No fuss, no muss and no install that can "accidently" get copied by users.
- Fix everyone's problem. While you can remotely deploy to a single PC or server on your network, Admin Arsenal is designed to let you deploy to one, some, many or all machines on your network. This selection process can be static (enumerated workstations in say Accounting) or dynamic (all servers running a given application).
See some examples of common application deployments.
View video of a Software Deployment.