Device onboarding is the crucial first step for lifecycle management. Here’s how FileWave reduces friction for IT admins and end users alike.
One of the top challenges facing many organizations is the need to manage an increasingly complex device landscape. Organizations are growing, endpoint complexity is growing, and even the number of endpoints per user is growing. This has been a problem for IT, with individual tools needed to manage each of these platforms. This leads to an increasingly siloed workforce based on tools and platforms that does not lend itself to workforce agility or a basis of endpoint management across the business.
In practical terms, FileWave works to close the “complexity gap,” using one tool to manage all critical endpoint management tasks under a single umbrella. A unified toolset helps you simplify and automate the cradle-to-grave life cycle of device management. In this first post of our lifecycle management series, we will explore that first step in device management: on-boarding, the process of enrolling, provisioning, and configuring or imaging your client devices.
Device Enrollment
FileWave makes it easy to enroll and deploy new devices. And easy is good.
FileWave’s device enrollment helps you automate your initial device set-up, whether you are on-boarding macOS, iOS, Windows, Android or Chromebooks devices. Whereas devices used to be deployed manually across each of these platforms, FileWave allows you to automate these workflows and facilitate the use of zero-touch enrollment programs such as Apple DEP.
In a complex device ecosystem, zero-touch deployments can still overwhelm any IT department. FileWave makes it easy to ensure that every new device is enrolled in a simple, straightforward process that ensures it can be effectively managed from day one of your device lifecycle.
Provisioning Devices
Each device needs its own identity, giving you greater control and visibility over that device, to know what’s installed on it, where it is, and who is using it. In the provisioning process, you create relationships that help you configure the device with all the applications and settings it needs – and only those it needs.
With FileWave, you can organize your environment to make future management easier, defining your organization as you see fit, or building upon our library of best practices. You can create relationships based on:
- Groups, such as physical location, to simplify management tasks and configuration needs
- The individual user and the device, including whether a device is BYOD or company-owned
- The user group, affecting the software, documents, and settings needed
Based on your pre-defined relationships, you’ll be able to deliver a simple image to speed up deployment and reduce the future touches that device will need.
FileWave takes zero-touch workflows and builds on them with greater control and customization to company standards. With FileWave managing DEP, devices come online, are assigned to a server, and pull the appropriate payload based on the profile created for that device and its relationships. All of this can be done out-of-the-box, allowing your IT team to hand out a device still in its shrinkwrap.
“A zero-touch workflow would not be possible without FileWave.”
– Dan DeRusha, Workstation Automation & Engineering, Matthews International
Device Configuration and Imaging
FileWave helps automate the installation of applications and settings in a controlled manner – ensuring installation occurs at the best time, in the right order, with the right settings, and complies with your security policies. For example, it’s one thing to have printer software installed, but it’s quite another to make sure that new devices can connect to the right printer the first time. The same extends to configuring software licenses or automatically updating deployed software to the latest patch level.
The cornerstone of effective device lifecycle management is to ensure that devices are deployed with everything your employees need to be productive – and everything your IT team needs to remotely manage that device until the end of its lifecycle. Stay tuned for our next post in lifecycle management: asset monitoring.
Want to see how FileWave can transform your device onboarding? Click here to attend a free demo of our software.
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