We image computers in a warehouse and ship them to remote locations. We would like to ensure that they are fully configured before they ship. The warehouse personnel don’t have access to the BigFix console or web reports.
Is there a way to detect whether a computer has finished all pending BigFix actions without the use of the console? I am mainly interested in the statuses of Completed, Fixed and Waiting indicating “complete”.
I was thinking of displaying a message of “All BigFix actions are complete” using a fixlet and then somehow excluding that one fixlet from the query if that makes sense.
This may be harder than you think due to policy actions that can reapply over and over but I think I get what you are trying to do.
There are a lot of actions that execute when the client starts up for the first time, gathering and subscribing to sites. I can’t think of a good way of doing what you want other than to suggest using a baseline to do all the work and the final action shuts the computer down (perhaps with a dialog to say that its done and you’re shutting it down)
Depending on how your baselines are structured, you could have a final action that configures a client setting, registry entry, or a breadcrumb file on the system. Then you could use a custom Client Dashboard to allow a user to check on the endpoint itself. A Client Dashboard is similar to a Web Report, except it executes on the client itself (visible as a new tab in the BESClientUI), and executes Client Relevance embedded in an HTML page rather than Session Relevance.
I like the idea of a custom client dashboard. This would be visible to the users imaging the computers and give them the feedback they need with regards to when actions are completed.
Have you had any experience with creating these and how would you embed the info showing the status of different actions running on the PC?
The default BESClientUI.exe will show quite a bit of info out of the box. You can change it to ‘always display’ with a fixlet in the BES Support Site - “485 BES Client Setting: Client UI Tray Mode Selection”
We have this enabled on our endpoints but when I go into this tab and click Show all actions from the last 30 days it is blank. This has always been the case for us. Is there a permission you need to setup to allow users on endpoints to view this information? It’s nice to see how it is supposed to look on the endpoint though and I think this would work for our warehouse users that do imaging to see when everything is finished and the computer is ready to ship.
Edit: I think I found out where this is, I needed to add the following setting: _BESClient_ActionManager_HistoryModeUser so that the user could see this info. I will also found this reference that points out some of the settings.
