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Answered

User Self-Service Portal

Would love to be able to have a Self-Service portal front end that our users can select additional software or updates from themselves. Would be an amazing feature to have and would provide a lot more flexibility for deployment and update options.

Anyone else think this would be a good feature to have or has anyone built their own?

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Comments

5 comments
Date Votes
  • Don't think this is something that they will be doing.

     

    You could however do something like setup a script that would present the user with a list of available software. When they select the software they want the script would then save the computer name and name of software to a text document or spreadsheet. Your computer running PDQ could then also run a script that checks the document for new entries and when It finds a new entry it starts the deployment to that computer.

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  • I confirm it could be really a great improvement

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  • They would have to completely re-write the backend of their software to be able to support this at scale. SQLite is just not the right tool for the job, and so a switch to something like MySQL would be necessary, which that in and of itself brings about its own set of challenges.

     

    Would I love to see an Inventory WebUI that my Helpdesk Staff could use and reference? Absolutely! But programatically it's a nightmare, not to mention having to re-evaluate a licensing model to make something like this feasible.

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  • This could be implemented in a way similar to Ghost Tasks work however it would require an agent be installed on the client machines and I know they are trying to stay away from doing that. But just to put the idea out there here is what I think would work.

     

    #1 make agent install optional so that agent free networks are still possible.

    #2 if an agent is made available it could be marketed as an optional thing that add's enhanced features that you just can't get otherwise but is always optional.

    #3 when packages are created in PDQ Deploy, one of the package options would be "Enable install by clients". When enabled it would then let you set if this package requires a password or not and if so set the password for the package install.

    #4 Each package would have an optional setting to only allow specific computers or collections to install via client request.

    #5 The agent that's running on the client machines would show up in the system tray and when a user clicks on its icon the agent contacts the PDQ deploy server and asks when packages are available for client install. The list of available packages are displayed to the user.

    #6 once the user selects an available package and provides the password if required, the client then passes the info to PDQ deploy and the package is pushed out to the client machine.

     

    I think this could be implemented with minimal impact to how the software currently is now, the key to everything though is getting the communication from the client machine to the PDQ deploy server. An agent running on the client machine would do the trick but they are trying to stay away from deploying agents to machines. This could also work the same without an installed agent on client and instead have the client visit a webpage hosted by the PDQ server. The same info could be passed to PDQ inventory via the website and push out to the IP of the machine performing the web request. This would however also require that a web server be added to PDQ Deploy.

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  • Agreed, this would be great.

    It would be similar to Self Service with Jamf. https://www.jamf.com/products/jamf-pro/self-service/

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