Software Deployment

At my last job I lucked out and all the faculty/staff shared a range of subnets, and a particular machine. I created a smart label to look for that range of IPs AND "System Model" contains Optiplex 330. 

At my new job I didn't get so lucky. I've included a reg key in the faculty/staff image the Kace inventories using a custom inventory. I then created a smart label to inventory that reg key, and depending on the number (random 4 digit number) it puts it in the appropriate label.

Custom Inventory: Department Location

RegistryValueReturn(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Department, Dept, TEXT)

Smart Label:

Custom Inventory: Department Location = 1000

I work at a college and have acad and staff machines.  We created two orgs on the k1000 and created machine placement rules to put them into the correct org. 

At my institution we have all computers in an OU depending on their department. I have LDAP labels setup to assign labels based on OU membership and use those to deploy software. All of these labels are in a label group called "Departments" and there is a smart label applied to machines with a department label, so campus wide deployments are targetted to that smart label for the most part.

Thank you all for your help... I will look into it some more... Been out of the office.

It may be better to perform a more granular approach as opposed to focusing solely on faculty/staff. You can create very refined smart labels that will automatically group workstations based on defined search criteria for example, a business that has a 4 year rotation cycle will typically have a myriad of different workstations. Using Dells, you could sort them by models (optiplex 740, 745, 750, etc.) and apply updates to those groups individually using smart labels. This is an extremely broad range, however, it could be refined to a greater extent using additional search criteria. Using this method allows all workstations to be targeted and updated as needed.

If it is still in your interest to soley target faculty workstations, it would be best to group them using smart labels using any data that only their workstations have in common. As an example, if they're all grouped via subnet, use that as a target for your smart labels (groups). If they're not separated via subnets or VLANs, look for something unique to their workstations such as models, software, etc.

When you've determined the best method for structuring your update strategies and have smart labels in place, you can start performing patch scans and Dell updates that only targets the smart labels (groups) you want to be involved with the updates.

Here's an article I wrote on labels and another that includes setting up LDAP, with examples from my own setup.

http://www.itninja.com/blog/view/k1000-labels-effective-organization-process-flow-using-manual-smart-ldap-labels-and-label-groups

http://www.itninja.com/blog/view/k1000-patching-setup-tips-things-i-have-learned-ldap-smart-labels-sql-reports

Hope that helps!

John