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PDQ Beacon to Deploy Packages to Specific Users and User Groups

Not sure if this will help anyone, or if anyone has input to make it better, but here at my school district we ran into a situation where we needed to deploy software to specific users. What we ended up doing, without going too in-depth, was setting up GPOs where users in specific groups create a file in the program data folder at login. The file gets named according to the user's group and job type. From there the file acts as a beacon for PDQ inventory. We then used PDQ to create a folder called PDQ Beacon in Progam Data for the beacon files to be written to. After that, we built a scanner to scan the PDQ Beacon Folder. Then we created dynamic collections in PDQ Inv that correlate to the beacon files.

For example, Teacher logs into the machine > The  Teacher is in the "teacher" group and a file is written to C:\Program Data\PDQ Beacons\ called "Teacher" > PDQ Inventory sees the file and puts the machine in the "Teacher" Dynamic Collection. Now I can use the Teacher Dynamic Collection to deploy software based on which machines Teachers are signing into. 

One road bump we're working on now is figuring out how to best control the dynamic group membership in a situation where a user logs into 20 machines. 

 

Hope this helps someone else and if anyone has any ideas to control the group or make the workflow better... We're all ears.

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