The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Ah the futility of making plans; so why bother? To paraphrase former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, “plans are useless, but planning is essential.” Careful planning allows you to react quickly and appropriately when plans go awry. The watchword here is flexibility. IT admins and managed service providers understand this all too well.
Rolling out software is a fairly simple example. Let’s use TeamViewer in this case. It seems like an easy enough task. An organization determines its goals, defines specific needs, and then requests certain settings to fulfill various requirements for performing tasks while maintaining appropriate measures for record keeping, security, and ease of use. What could possibly go wrong?
For a large number of installations, the IT department would likely decide to create an MSI package to install, in one fell swoop, the proper files and establish the necessary default settings in the registry of every installation across the organization. It’s easy, efficient, and ensures that all requirements are met. So is the plan at least.
Good planning includes flexibility
Let the rollout begin! It’s at this point that the need for modifications becomes apparent. “We really need to have this setting locked so that people can’t make changes; we updated our security policy, and all passwords have to be a minimum of eight characters, etc.” Even with a highly successful rollout, evolving business needs may soon require modifications to the initial settings, for example something as simple as updating the whitelist. Such changes aren’t difficult, but they can be time consuming to implement for every software installation. In the past, this might have meant having to export a .reg file and then import it to every machine that required the modified settings.
TeamViewer 10 setting policies provide flexibility
TeamViewer 10 has changed all of this in the form of centralized setting policies. Administrators are now able to implement settings for all of the installations that are linked to their account. After a new rollout, for example, settings can be implemented and distributed on the fly, and updates to policies can be made at any time. In essence, flexibility is built in to TeamViewer through the Management Console.
Whether you have 5 installations spread throughout the office or 500 installations spread across the globe, centralized setting policies ensure that TeamViewer is set up and running exactly how you need it to.
Basic tips for using setting policies
- A single policy can contain a wide variety of settings
- Assign policies to single installations or whole groups at once
- Different groups can have different policies. For example, Marketing might need a different setup than Sales or Support.
- Don’t forget to click “enforce” if you don’t want anyone changing a particular setting
To experience for yourself just how flexible and efficient central setting policies are, download TeamViewer 10 today and log into the Management Console.
