5 ms·

Deploy your own, stand-alone osquery instance - it’s open source. Airwatch/Workspace One was a terrible product even before the acquisitions. You may want to t

by w0de0 3y ago

Deploy your own, stand-alone osquery instance - it’s open source. Airwatch/Workspace One was a terrible product even before the acquisitions. You may want to try FleetDM, an MDM product that deeply integrates osquery (an intersecting set of people are responsible for the two).

wkat4242 3y ago
I don't agree, I really liked airwatch and we managed tens of thousands of mobiles with it. It had its issues but every product does. The problem was that when we had to move to Intune some features we used in airwatch weren't even supported yet! It really made me laugh when Gartner put Intune in their magical Quadrant but not airwatch as Intune wasn't even feature complete at that point for basic mobile uses. I'm sure those Gartner guys just talk to the sales suits but don't actually try the products. But now we're stuck with Intune due to decisions made at top level.
- w0de0 3y ago
  When I used it, I was managing mostly Macs - and I never used it pre-vmware. This probably encouraged my flippancy! Is there even an established, reliable alternative to intune for Windows? I don’t know.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Yeah the Mac side was the worst. Many features didn't work reliably or were not updated quickly enough to keep up with OS updates. It was all very beta unfortunately. For Mac JAMF is pretty much the gold standard and I tried to get it but the leadership preferred a "single pane of glass" sadly. For Windows we always just used SCCM and even now we're only in hybrid mode with most functions in traditional management.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - computerfriend 3y ago
      I don't really know much about this area, but I did poke around Jamf one or twice and it seems absolutely awful. Not disagreeing that it might be the gold standard, but that doesn't really say much in the MDM industry. For example: any single Jamf admin can type a bash script into a text box which will then be automatically executed on every machine as root.
      - angulardragon03 3y ago
        yes, this is a core tenet of "Device Management". You can restrict this ability using the built-in (granular) access controls.
        computerfriend 3y ago
        I don't think that no approvals, no CI, webpage text box to fleet-wide root is a core tenet. Maybe a commonality though.
        angulardragon03 3y ago
        No approvals and no CI with clickops is indeed not a core tenet, but these are things you can implement on top of a solution like Jamf. However, the market wasn’t always asking for it. Most Mac management is done by a sole individual at the org, usually not a large team where everyone can review everyone’s changes. This is steadily changing, but there are still tons of people who do clickops in Jamf because it’s what they understand and have the bandwidth to do.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        We have almost a hundred thousand users and we don't have an approval process for macs either. Because we only have a few hundred :) I think the windows guys have everything more proceduralised. But the Mac work is more of a one man show. I still don't think they have an approvals process though. They mainly still use SCCM and I don't think that has approvals built in. And yeah things get tested in a separate environment before they're deployed in live. But as there's just one person doing both on Mac there's not much point to an approvals process. Which is also the person that gets to deal with any mistakes so there generally aren't any :) And it's not a bad thing either, the Mac side is usually much quicker to adopt new features. Both because there's not that many and because Mac users are always interested in new OS versions whereas Windows users generally prefer to stay on what they know.
  - mikermcneil 3y ago
    We just launched open-source Windows MDM in Fleet: https://fleetdm.com/device-management https://fleetdm.com/device-management
    - mdaniel 3y ago
      linky: https://github.com/fleetdm/fleet/blob/fleet-v4.45.1/tools/mdm https://github.com/fleetdm/fleet/blob/fleet-v4.45.1/tools/md... and seems to be mostly MIT Expat <https://github.com/fleetdm/fleet/blob/fleet-v4.45.1/LICENSE https://github.com/fleetdm/fleet/blob/fleet-v4.45.1/LICENSE>
- computerfriend 3y ago
  Gartner of course don't try the products. It's just an advertisement racket.

by w0de0 3y ago

wkat4242 3y ago

I don't agree, I really liked airwatch and we managed tens of thousands of mobiles with it. It had its issues but every product does. The problem was that when we had to move to Intune some features we used in airwatch weren't even supported yet! It really made me laugh when Gartner put Intune in their magical Quadrant but not airwatch as Intune wasn't even feature complete at that point for basic mobile uses. I'm sure those Gartner guys just talk to the sales suits but don't actually try the products. But now we're stuck with Intune due to decisions made at top level.

w0de0 3y ago
When I used it, I was managing mostly Macs - and I never used it pre-vmware. This probably encouraged my flippancy! Is there even an established, reliable alternative to intune for Windows? I don’t know.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Yeah the Mac side was the worst. Many features didn't work reliably or were not updated quickly enough to keep up with OS updates. It was all very beta unfortunately. For Mac JAMF is pretty much the gold standard and I tried to get it but the leadership preferred a "single pane of glass" sadly. For Windows we always just used SCCM and even now we're only in hybrid mode with most functions in traditional management.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - computerfriend 3y ago
    I don't really know much about this area, but I did poke around Jamf one or twice and it seems absolutely awful. Not disagreeing that it might be the gold standard, but that doesn't really say much in the MDM industry. For example: any single Jamf admin can type a bash script into a text box which will then be automatically executed on every machine as root.
    - angulardragon03 3y ago
      yes, this is a core tenet of "Device Management". You can restrict this ability using the built-in (granular) access controls.
      - computerfriend 3y ago
        I don't think that no approvals, no CI, webpage text box to fleet-wide root is a core tenet. Maybe a commonality though.
        angulardragon03 3y ago
        No approvals and no CI with clickops is indeed not a core tenet, but these are things you can implement on top of a solution like Jamf. However, the market wasn’t always asking for it. Most Mac management is done by a sole individual at the org, usually not a large team where everyone can review everyone’s changes. This is steadily changing, but there are still tons of people who do clickops in Jamf because it’s what they understand and have the bandwidth to do.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        We have almost a hundred thousand users and we don't have an approval process for macs either. Because we only have a few hundred :) I think the windows guys have everything more proceduralised. But the Mac work is more of a one man show. I still don't think they have an approvals process though. They mainly still use SCCM and I don't think that has approvals built in. And yeah things get tested in a separate environment before they're deployed in live. But as there's just one person doing both on Mac there's not much point to an approvals process. Which is also the person that gets to deal with any mistakes so there generally aren't any :) And it's not a bad thing either, the Mac side is usually much quicker to adopt new features. Both because there's not that many and because Mac users are always interested in new OS versions whereas Windows users generally prefer to stay on what they know.
- mikermcneil 3y ago
  We just launched open-source Windows MDM in Fleet: https://fleetdm.com/device-management https://fleetdm.com/device-management
  - mdaniel 3y ago
    linky: https://github.com/fleetdm/fleet/blob/fleet-v4.45.1/tools/mdm https://github.com/fleetdm/fleet/blob/fleet-v4.45.1/tools/md... and seems to be mostly MIT Expat <https://github.com/fleetdm/fleet/blob/fleet-v4.45.1/LICENSE https://github.com/fleetdm/fleet/blob/fleet-v4.45.1/LICENSE>
computerfriend 3y ago
Gartner of course don't try the products. It's just an advertisement racket.