Casper Roll-out - How to best educate clients?

[aamjohns]

I am about to do our full scale roll-out of Casper and since we are going from pretty much unmanaged environment to this - I want to present the highlights to people. Things like Self Service. Most of these people will be doctors and most will not read anything (too busy I suppose).

I thought I might try a different approach and make short videos with Camtasia but I am not liking the results.

I am wondering if anyone else went through this and how you brought the highlights to your clients attention?

Thanks.

[rderewianko]

We started out with quite a big repository in self service.. Giving our users value to having it on their machine. After they got use to the idea we got the remaining users to install or did it for them.

Now, we don't give them any DMG's or licences its all done through selfservice. If they want it, they have to have self service.

We didn't really explain the value of the backend (the jss) other than a FAQ explaining how it helps us.

[aamjohns]

Hi rderewianko,
Yes, I am really wanting to utilize self service. I don't want to force things on people. I will force updates, but not the software itself. And I have published more than just installing software through self service. So yeah, self service is really the key here. That and them understanding how I've setup updating.

But if they won't read a short description of it and how to use...

[tuinte]

I installed Self Service on every machine via a policy, then sent a simple mass email which pretty much said, "You don't need to call us anymore to update Firefox," with some simple instructions (open Self Service, click Install to install updates). In Self Service itself I set up an FAQ webpage as a Self Service plugin so people have something readily available to reference. FAQ questions include: What is it? How does it work? How do I know it worked? What if it doesn't work? What if an update I know exists isn't available in Self Service? I have 1-2 paragraph answers for each.

[mm2270]

@aamjohns - are the users of these systems all on 10.8, or do you have a mix of Operating System versions?

Reason I ask is, you may want to bring awareness to Self Service using something they'd be a little more inclined to read or pay attention to. For example, what if you could send a short message to Mountain Lion's Notification Center that told them "Updates for your apps are available in Self Service. Click this message to view them". When they click the message, it launches Self Service so they can explore it and see what it has to offer. Would something like that be useful?
Of course the above would only work on Mountain Lion. If you primarily have older OSes or a large mix of versions it might not be as useful.

@tuinte - I like the idea of the FAQ in Self Service as a webpage plug-in. I wish we were using the Self Service plug-ins, but we haven't done so here. I may just need to bring that one up again to see if we can start utilizing it.

[aamjohns]

Hi mm2270,
You are always so helpful to me. Thank you.

Yeah, what's happening is we are going to be pulling in everything from 10.6.8 and up. I like your idea though.

@tuinte - my thought was this... once a system is enrolled, each user will get a new shortcut on their desktop that will take them to an intranet page that talks about Casper and the services we are providing through it. I wrote up a short as possible document and sent it to my peers for review and no one has responded (not unusual).

Also, I have implemented through Self Service the ability for a user to put in a helpdesk support ticket. I could also put in a FAQ like you said.

Thanks.