Chapter 7. Client Management
Put simply, no environment is too small to preclude evaluating your client management strategy. Whether you have two desktops or 100,000, there are tools and practices that can make both your life and your users' lives easier. A properly managed environment can save endless administration hours, and in many cases thousands of phone calls to an organization's support center. Long gone are the days of shuffling from computer to computer meticulously duplicating settings. Numerous tools now abound to save you from this monotonous nightmare—tools which provide you with the ability to affect tens, hundreds, or thousands of computers from a central point quickly and effectively. These tools empower you to effectively manage a computing environment with minimal staff cost.
What exactly is entailed in a good client management system? The answer will certainly vary depending upon whom you ask. If you ask a Windows system administrator, you're likely to hear talk of proper Active Directory Organizational Unit (OU) structure and elaborate Group Policy Object (GPO) inheritance trees, or you might hear of third party solutions and deploying .msi installers for settings, as described in Chapter 6. From a help desk perspective, the focus will largely be on finding, connecting to, and controlling client desktops (both the screen and the policies). Policy enforcement to ensure consistent environments across a multitude of desktops is also an invaluable way to ease the burden of remote support.
Mass deployment and imaging, along with package management systems, will often be lumped into the client management category because they intertwine. However, there is a distinction to be made. The latter is utilized to ensure a consistent, specially tailored software environment that is preconfigured to utilize your management systems. It is primarily focused on the deployment of a particular system's software environment. In contrast, controlling the user desktop experience is one of the main focal points of client management, providing facilities for automated setup of supported userland applications. These include dock, desktop and Finder customization, login items, network mounts, application preferences, media access, and any application that writes data into the user's home folder, such as Entourage. For the purposes of this book, client management picks up right where mass deployment ends—once the systems are deployed client management can be used to push default settings out and then lock certain features of the system down.
This chapter will attempt to provide insight into the important considerations that are needed to ensure that your post deployment environment is planned in a manner that will not only ensure its initial success, but will also be easily adaptable as technical needs or policies change. A successfully planned and managed client implementation is predicated by numerous metrics:
The existence of a tiered management hierarchy, structured appropriately for the environment to ensure granularity and scalability.
The chosen policy implementation properly addresses the technical needs of the managed node's workflow, as well as the managed user's workflow.
The chosen policy implementation adheres to global MIS policies.
Management restrictions are as unobtrusive to end users as possible.
Policy implementation is performed centrally, is dynamic, and can be easily changed across both a small and large scope of machines or users.
After reading this chapter, you will become familiar with numerous management principals to effect these goals: managing Open Directory's managed preferences system, user data planning, implementation and management, software update management, account and password policy management, and last but not least, live interactive management of your computer fleet using Apple Remote Desktop.