Trying to help new Admin
I'm trying to help a new admin who just purchased your product. Do you have a competent install guide somewhere. One that doesn't hop around like a kid in a candy store? The admin is under the impression that you just install PDQ deploy on what normal people call a "server", and then you just push stuff out to what we call "clients" after opening holes in the client's firewall. What I see on the clients is a port that is open, but is not connected to an app, so of course nothing happens. I'm assuming there is a client agent or something that must be installed on the client, but your install guide only says "Hey! install our fantastic do-it-all-app". Not where or on what, or what other steps might be needed on the client.
Please help out your customers and publish a competent install guide.
Comments
I will try to clarify some of your questions:
Thank you for your response. I would stand by my request to include more details in your installation guide. Start by giving an overview of function, from the perspective of a person who is installing it. "Install app" doesn't help if you don't first explain that the. "Pick a host to install the app on which will function as the administrative control system for PDQ. You do not need to install anything on any target or client computers. PDQ is a clientless application." Remember not to make assumptions. You should also explain things like "PDQ should be installed on a PC in your AD domain, and can only manage PCs in that AD domain, for which the install AD account has admin rights to."
I am not a PDQ employee (just a happy customer) but I do know that many of them frequent these forums so hopefully someone sees your suggestions.
I am not sure what documentation you read but the documentation here is fairly robust: https://www.pdq.com/documentation/
In response to your points:
The Central Server feature is a relatively new feature for PDQ, before that it was common for PDQ users to simply install the software on their workstation and maintain their own local installations of the software with no collaboration with other users. Some of the "just install app"-style documentation you are describing could be old documentation that is a holdover from that period. Additionally, the Central Server feature is restricted to only the paid versions of PDQ, and it is my impression that there are quite a few free users who would probably be operating PDQ in that more traditional way where they would literally just install the app on their workstation and be more or less done with it.
I agree that they should more widely advertise the fact that PDQ is agentless, but they did briefly offer an experimental PDQ agent that has since been deprecated so perhaps they held back on including that in their marketing because there was previously a move away from that model.
While I would personally consider a PDQ environment without AD to be nearly useless, it is entirely possible (especially for small shops) to operate it without AD. You can enter local credentials in both Inventory and Deploy to manage remote computers that are not in the same AD domain as the computer hosting your PDQ console or your PDQ server. It is certainly much more seamless to closely integrate it with AD but it is not, strictly speaking, a requirement.