Host:
Welcome back to the Endpoint Management podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Alphaeus Mote about Adaptiva's incredibly powerful tools for workflow building and automation and how it can deliver a massive reduction on effort and cost of enterprise management administration. If you enjoy this, maybe check out our other episodes about optimizing over WAN and LAN, why peer-to-peer architecture outperforms SCCM by a huge margin, and more. As always, links are in the show notes, where you can find everything you need and get in touch with us at adaptiva.com.

Alphaeus Mote:
This is Alphaeus Mote with Adaptiva and today we're going to talk about how the upgrade and deployment process in enterprises has gone completely insane and how Adaptiva workflows can replace that insanity with simple automation-ready workflows that deliver repeatable success. If you've worked in IT for more than five minutes, you'll know and have experienced the fact that IT ecosystems are a mess. And usually, there's some sort of a goal that organizations are trying to achieve and there's a number of different tools and avenues by which that goal could be achieved. But, because of skill gaps and tools and budgets, things like that, you end up in a situation where you get a hodgepodge of solutions, all webbed together and if that process breaks even in one spot, the whole house of cards comes crashing down. And so being able to have a tool set that is tightly integrated and brings all those things into one section greatly, greatly simplifies that house of cards and reduces the catastrophic failure that could take place.

Alphaeus Mote:
The other thing here is that when constructing your own internal solutions, it just adds to the mess. Being able to partner with a company that provides the ability to get to that goal is ultimately where you want to be. With the Adaptiva software suite when developing in-house applications, there are interfaces that allow those in-house applications to interface with the Adaptiva suite of tools. And if you're writing in things such as C, C++, C Sharp, .net, you can access different APIs or libraries that allow you to access various functionality from the Adaptiva's suite within your third party application. There's also the tool Foundry. The tool Foundry allows you to take various workflows and things that you've compiled within the Adaptiva workbench and compile that workflow into an executable and then set execution policies on that executable that allow that executable to be launched from within a script or called from some other method on demand.

Alphaeus Mote:
There's also the PowerShell CommandLet Foundry. The PowerShell CommandLet Foundry allows IT administrators to create their own PowerShell commands on the server or endpoints by simply clicking a workflow and making the new commands instantly available for use. One example of this is that you could construct the workflow within the Adaptiva Workbench and upon doing so you could make that entire workflow be able to be called from a client by publishing it as a command that follows the PowerShell verb / noun nomenclature. So it could be something like "get Adaptiva client." And basically this would allow you to, as stated before execute that entire workflow from within a PowerShell script to some other method and execute the workflow as if it were running local on the machine. The combination of these tools make it easy to do the incredibly powerful authoring that can integrate into all parts of your ecosystem and the beauty is that things get simpler instead of more complicated.

Alphaeus Mote:
That's the simple version. But the real question is what is the underlying value to an organization? Let's face it. Every company has the need to perform processes in a specific order. And one example I can think of is doing software deployment. When you do software deployment, you have to package the application, which means you have to procure content. You have to determine what the software manufacturer released that application as which is going to determine your deployment style, whether or not they use the MSI or an executable or a batch script, or it's a driver or something along these lines, then you have to deliver the content and then you also have to make sure that the script that you write to do all the steps before the application is installed, installing the application, and then also after the application is installed. And then also ensuring that the user is not interrupted to the best of your ability. Every company has to do that. With the use of the Adaptiva workflow editor, it allows you to set up these sorts of processes in a repeatable way with huge benefits.

Alphaeus Mote:
So here are the four biggest benefits of leveraging the Adaptiva tool set. Number one, you can easily design any workflow you want and it will be repeatable. You can also schedule it and deploy it to a targeted subset of devices or just all devices in general. The workflow designer comes with hundreds of prebuilt actions to make your jobs easier, but also has the extensibility to add in your various customizations such as scripts or running particular tools or things that you may have to do to automate additional processes. One such activity would be being able to interact with the SCCM client from within your workflow.

Alphaeus Mote:
Adaptiva comes with a built-in activity that allows you to refresh machine policy, user policy, discovery data Harbor inventory, and these particular activities are nothing new. We can call them from a number of different suites and tool sets, but when it comes down to automation and being able to do it from within a workflow, you don't have to work up any additional tools or scripts or go figure out how to interface with the SCCM client. You can do it natively from day one. Example two is that you can run and activate these workflows from anywhere in your existing environment, no matter what your deployment strategy might be. As stated before we've got PowerShell, we've got the API Foundry, and we expanded on that a little bit, the tool Foundry and anything else that we may want to include in the future. So you might have people in your organization that might be good at PowerShell for example.

Alphaeus Mote:
They may decide to go that particular route, but you might have really hardcore developers that write software, and they may want to leverage the APIs that allow them to interface with Adaptiva or you might just have a level two technician or a desktop technician, and you may just want to be able to hand them a downloadable executable from a link or carry something on a flash drive that allows them to perform advanced actions that have been already designed and structured with the clickable of a button.

Alphaeus Mote:
Example number three with the overall goal of ensuring consistency and reducing human error is making sure that we develop standards and we adhere to those standards, except for in special cases. I can think of an example in my work history, where I was working at an organization and people used different coding standards on the team that I was a member of and it resulted in the particular process that they came up with would work in a very specific environment. But if you had to move it over to a test environment, if you had to move it to a different machine or a machine that might have been configured differently, then because their variables for example were static and they weren't being figured out at run time, this broke the code and caused all types of issues.

Alphaeus Mote:
We want to get away from those types of things. Inside the workflow editor, you'll still have to develop standards and adhere to those standards. But if you go to extra mile and do those things, your workflows will be dynamic and work anywhere you deploy. The impact of developing standards and adhering to those standards is that it puts the organizational knowledge and process into the tool instead of just being held in someone's head, which is safer for everyone and lets everyone build together. And in addition, if somebody has to leave the organization or transfer for some emergency reason, life change or whatever, you don't have to do a huge knowledge transfer. You can kind of keep moving on and wish them the best.

Alphaeus Mote:
The fourth point is because we're taking IT strategy, developing processes and adhering to those standards, we take the entire ecosystem in the entire life cycle and we make it revealable, refinable, and repeatable and thereby reduce human error. We establish a higher percentage of business continuity. And I know that if I were a CIO or a top IT manager, I would love not to have to just eat lunch at my desk in five minutes and get back to some issue or some large call that's going to take all day. I would love to be able to actually go out and take my different team members out for lunches for an actual hour and come back with no stress.

Host:
Thanks for joining us for today's episode from Adaptiva, where we're working to take the pain out of endpoint management with a solution that scales automatically so that your management maintenance and infrastructure costs don't have to. For more information about how we do that, visit us at adaptiva.com.