Admit it, all of us in the IT world who would love to just be able to press a button and deploy software without affecting the end user experience.  Unfortunately we all know that updates/deployments can be intrusive especially when a reboot is involved; and as you and I both know, the end user’s perception of IT directly relates to how well we are able to stay out of their way.  As one of my favorite quotes from Futurama says: “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

There are a number of different approaches to staying out of the users’ way while still keeping the our environment up and running smoothly.  Some of these include:

To complicate matters, many companies I come across offering some plugin for SCCM to manage third party applications fail to grasp this concept - ESPECIALLY when it comes to applications requiring an action to take place like closing Office or Internet Explorer (I’m looking at you, Java).  They just expect the user to be okay with those actions happening without warning.

THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY

There is.  We do a few things here at my company that have allowed us to keep a clean and maintained desktop while still keeping out of the way of our users (where possible), and I plan on using this series to cover some of those processes.  The topics I will cover over the following weeks include: