Should I create one, or multiple Deployments?

What

We have established in the previous article that you can combine any payloads or destinations into the same deployment if all of the metadata would be the same. For example, I want to deploy Firefox and Chrome to the IT and HR departments starting on Friday at 6 PM. Everything matches, so I can put them in the same deployment…but, should I?

When/Why

We’ll want to very carefully think about how we intend to organize our deployments, and how we’ll want to modify them in future before we can answer the above question.

How

But the answer to the question is “it depends”. It depends on what is easiest for you, the FileWave administrator. Primarily you’ll want to organize deployments based on the payload(s), or based on the destination(s), but not both at the same time. Other key differentiators are going to be the method of delivery (i.e. push vs. pull) and the platform.

An example (always) works best:

Let’s consider the following table of overall payloads/destinations…

Payload (Filesets) Destination (Devices) Google Chrome - PC (Push) All Windows Devices Google Chrome - macOS (Push) All macOS Devices Firefox - PC (Kiosk) All WIndows Devices Firefox - macOS (Kiosk) All macOS Devices Adobe Acrobat Reader - PC (Push) All Windows Devices Adobe Acrobat Reader - macOS (Push) All macOS Devices TeamViewer Host - PC (Push) All Windows Devices TeamViewer Host - macOS (Push) All macOS Devices

So, how would we best create as few deployments as possible?

We’d likely combine Adobe Acrobat Reader, Chrome, and TeamViewer Host into TWO common deployments, split by platform, and we might call them something like this:

Standard Apps PC (Push) Standard Apps Mac (Push) And for Firefox, we would also create two deployments (again because we don’t want to mix platforms), and we’d probably name them something like this:

Optional Apps PC (Kiosk) Optional Apps Mac (Kiosk)

And we arranged them in that way because now we have some excellent base building blocks for adding other apps if the destinations are the same (i.e. the All groups). For instance, if we added a new installer, say MSFT Teams, then we can easily simply add it to the proper deployments, and it would be available to all of the same devices with the same options.