In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about Five EUC Resolutions to Make in 2021. One of the most exciting items on that list was item number three: Enhance Automation with Workspace ONE UEM Freestyle Orchestrator.
Freestyle Orchestrator was announced officially at VMworld 2020 and is one of the most intriguing releases of the past twelve months. Brian Link’s initial blog post about the product is fantastic and is available here. Below I walk through a few easy steps you can take to get started with Workspace ONE UEM Freestyle Orchestrator.
A quick disclaimer: Freestyle Orchestrator is currently available in select SaaS consoles, so please work with your Customer Success Executive and Account Executive to discuss timelines for when Freestyle Orchestrator can be enabled in your environment. Regardless, it’s essential to understand the tool in order to begin planning for how you will improve automation for your device fleet.
Getting Started
First, let’s verify that your environment is enabled with Freestyle Orchestrator. You can confirm this availability very quickly from the Workspace ONE UEM dashboard. Look in the upper left-hand portion of the screen. If your environment has Freestyle enabled, you will see an option titled “Freestyle” just above “Monitor”, as shown below:
Now that you’ve verified feature availability, click the “Freestyle” button to get started. You’ll be greeted with the following screen. Click “Get Started” to continue.
This will bring you to a screen where you can construct a new workflow. Begin by typing in a title and description for your workflow. For this “Getting Started” entry, we’ll stick with a simple example. Let’s say we want to install an elevated level of restrictions on any Windows device that does not have a new version of Google Chrome installed. First, look in the right-hand pane and select the Platform, followed by the Smart Group that we are assigning the automation to.
Next, we’ll add our primary condition. Click the “Add” drop-down. You can select from a resource, a condition and a group. We’ll start directly with an “IF” condition.
Once we select Condition, click the drop-down for “IF.” As per our example, we want to determine if an Application exists and is of a specific version.
After choosing the primary condition, you’ll see a more detailed condition module. Note that I’ve set the condition to detect if a device has an application name, including the string “Chrome”, and whether that application is of version less than 87.0.
Next, we need the “THEN” operator. For this example, we want to install a profile containing an additional set of device restrictions. Having a profile (or other resource) for this step should be considered a prerequisite to this entire process. Click the “+ THEN” button and then select the “Resource > Profile” option.
You will then see a search window to find the profile by name. I named my profile “Extra Restrictions” as shown below.
After you proceed, you will see the detail of the profile to confirm its details, as shown below.
Click “Publish”, and your workflow will be created. You will see a warning verifying if you are serious. Click “Yes” to finalize and activate the automation.
Lastly, you’ll be brought back to the Freestyle Orchestrator dashboard. You’ll find the automation we just created with all its pertinent details.
If you click the workflow name, you’ll be brought to a summary showing the workflow detail as well as affected devices and their statuses.
Our automation is complete! Freestyle Orchestrator is a powerful tool and will only become more powerful as additional features are added. I recommend getting a jump start on this technology today to prepare yourself for the future of mobile workflow automation.
Next Steps
Still need help deciding how to drive value in your organization using VMware End User Computing technologies? VMware Professional Services offers services to help you get started. Please contact your VMware Customer Success Executive or Account Executive to discuss Freestyle Orchestrator.
