More and more companies are focused on digital transformation and how best to enable their employees to work from anywhere on any device. They are considering how best to navigate remote work, security complexity and employee enablement simultaneously, with many doing so on an accelerated timetable due in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic. By and large, VMware Workspace ONE has been embraced as a top platform of comprehensive tools to drive these transformative journeys across organizations.
In the world of endpoint management, the needs of the modern administrator are evolving just as rapidly as the endpoint technologies that they intend to support. With Workspace ONE UEM these administrators are able to manage security policies, patch management, applications and more across all of their devices. However, the use cases and business needs of our customers continue to increase in complexity as their ecosystems become far more complicated and their own customers more demanding. As their needs evolve, it is imperative that we evolve our capabilities right alongside them.
• How can we enable the modern admin to ensure that their deployments are allowing for the right comprehensive decisions to meet the conditional needs for things like resource delivery, entitlement, security, compliance and more?
• How can we help our customers automate and orchestrate both the mundane as well as the overtly complex elements of their daily responsibilities?
• How can we achieve these things in a manner that reduces the burden and simplifies the engagement with our tools?
We are excited to meet this rise in complexity head on and take Modern Management to the next level – earlier this week at VMworld 2020, we introduced Freestyle Orchestrator. Freestyle Orchestrator will offer a new and radically different way to interact with the Workspace ONE ecosystem. Coming first to Workspace ONE UEM, our customers will be able to use Freestyle Orchestrator to create intricate workflows and unlock a significant variety of deployment use cases across their enterprise.
• Maybe you need to build a complicated onboarding workflow for your Windows 10 fleet that spans various manufacturers, makes and models…
• Perhaps you’re looking to distribute a number of security apps and policies that simply must be present prior to the deployment of your productivity tools and scripts…
• Possibly you have a security event where you need to remediate endpoints that have a specific app version installed or meet some other specific conditional criteria…
• Or maybe you just want to offer a bundled group of apps or other resources to simplify the deployment process…
With Freestyle Orchestrator, all of this and more is possible.
When first considering the initial concept of what would become Freestyle Orchestrator, we really wanted to offer a better way to meet the dynamic deployment needs of Enterprise IT. We wanted to offer something that was immediately approachable – a sandbox wherein an admin could immediately create the workflows that they need quickly and intuitively, but without having to sacrifice the power that they have come to expect from VMware technologies. We wanted a framework that would allow for continued scale and extensibility across Workspace ONE UEM and beyond. Through all of this, we hoped that we could represent an intelligent system of intention, where an administrator can express themselves and the needs of their business freely through the technology itself. It was herein that abstracts such as the orchestrator canvas, the various administrative panels and the multiple elements offered therein began to take shape.
When customers first go hands on with Freestyle Orchestrator they will be greeted by our new designer canvas. Here they will have access to preconfigured Resources like apps, profiles, policies and scripts. Additionally, they will be able to construct powerful conditions comprised of things like app presence and/or version, file or registry, Sensor values and even particular windows of time. These Resources, Conditions and Commands will be represented visually as logical blocks of varying shapes that connect with one another on the canvas. Or, if your preference is our List Builder view, then you’ll find your workflows represented through a series of textual steps. An Admin Panel located on the righthand side of the designer will dynamically provide more detail into each step and can be used to configure your Resources or Conditions as needed to further refine the workflow. By mapping these logical ‘blocks’ and conditions together, your workflows will spring to life as they branch and nest accordingly to account for a robust variety of contextual decisions through a single interaction paradigm only found within Freestyle Orchestrator. At a glance, it’s easy to imagine how this system will continue to scale to allow for new resources, conditions, and integrations further down the road. The potential and power of Freestyle Orchestrator truly lies within its endless possibilities of crafted workflows.
So how will you get started?
- Access Freestyle Orchestrator via the navigational menu in Workspace UEM.
- Determine the smart groups you’d like to target and which OS platform you’re building your workflow for. Freestyle Orchestrator will be available for both Windows 10 and macOS on day one, with other OS platforms coming soon.
- Choose from any number of configured Resources/Commands, or add a Condition as the first step in your workflow.
- Make any necessary adjustments or configurations in the Admin Panel on the right-hand side.
- Repeat as necessary.
Once your workflow looks correct, simply choose to Save or Publish. It really is that easy.
Get started with Freestyle Orchestrator later this year and introduce a new kind of normal for your Workspace ONE UEM deployment and beyond.
