(imported topic written by hanspjacobsen)
We are thinking about providing a security solution ASP for consumers and small business using BES and were wondering if there are any companies except gateway that have done this.
(imported comment written by BenKus)
Hello,
Yes… I know of at least 10 customers who do something very similar to this on scales of managing 100 agents up to managing 100,000 agents… BES fits nicely in this role because it is very flexible and centralizable and the communications paths are very robust and secure and work in almost any environment.
Ben
(imported comment written by hanspjacobsen)
What we are thinking about is offering managing client for small organization from 1 computer up to 100 from one bes installation. We could end up with 1000 + costumers being administrated from one single server. What I see as the greatest hurdle is how to manage all different expiration dates of there licensing since many will come and go in such a service.
Hans
(imported comment written by BenKus)
Hi hans,
Please contact our sales department and they will work out a licensing scheme that works best for you.
Ben
(imported comment written by hanspjacobsen)
Hi Ben I’m not really worried about the marketing side of thing regarding licensing since one always can come to some agreement on things. What my main concern is if it’s feasible and if anyone has tried anything similar? In a best case scenario one could end up with 10 000 users for such a service. How does one administrate potentially 10 000 different costumer when it comes to adding new costumers all the time and also removing disabling the when they don’t pay there bill or chose not to renew the service. I know this could be done manually but this would make such a service a finical disaster or to expensive. How hard would it be to integrate with some type of ordering crm solution that could daily output a text file. This is still in my head but we need to know if it’s doable with out having to spend 10 000 usd + on customisation. BES is probably not designed for what I’m suggesting so I need to know if it sounds like a really bad idea before we start testing out this idea on potential costumers.
Also our primary market is Norway, Scandinavia where BigFix doesn’t support the local Windows OS language. How many people or present of a position would we need to be able to create all the appropriate fixlets to patch Window XP and Vista?
(imported comment written by BenKus)
Hi Hans,
There are APIs that you can use to do integration tasks, but you would need to make sure you are licensed properly to do that sort of thing.
The basic way that most customers I have seen tackle this sort of thing is to do the following:
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Provide a way to “tag” each customer with the name of the customer (usually this is done with a modified installer that looks in a file to get the name to write to the registry). This gets returned in a property that you can use to target actions of all types.
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In the event that the computer is no longer a customer, you can use the built-in Uninstall Tasks in the BES Support Fixlet site to remove the agents from any computers you want.
I don’t have an answer for you if dealing with a large number of small customers is cost effective due to the transaction and technical overhead per customer, but I believe that the overhead on the BES side of things can be minimized with simple processes (that is sort of the whole idea around the BES platform in the first place).
Hope that helps in some way,
Ben
(imported comment written by hanspjacobsen)
Ben thanks for helping me one last question
Our primary market is Norway, Scandinavia where BigFix doesn’t support the local Windows OS language. How many people or present of a position would we need to be able to create all the appropriate fixlets for patching Window XP and Vista per language?
Thanks
Hans