How did you get your opt-in beta testers?

[Eltord]

I'm looking to get in some opt-in beta testers from our user base. At this moment, all of our beta testers are inside of mine and surrounding teams, and we are all under the same leadership so its easy for me to just say "hey, guess what, you're a beta tester now, congratulations!" and just put them in a static group.

I now want to get some users into that test group, so they can make sure their workflows all function when there's a new OS update, things like that. I'm unsure how best to go about this though, so I thought I'd ask the community, see what you all have done if you've been in this scenario before.

Thanks for any and all the input

[k3vmo]

@dan-snelson had a great session at JNUC 2019 on how he does it via Self Service.  in the process of setting up how he did it as well -   Youtube video 

[MacInTX]

Couldn't you just create a Self Service policy called "I'd like to be a beta tester" (or something like that) which writes a file that you search for as an extended attribute.  Then create a smart group that looks for that file?  

[Eltord]

Oh yeah, I had similar thoughts on doing that for sure. My question was more targeted on how do you get those users to click that button or agree to be an opt-in tester, not so much how do you get them in scope.

[dan-snelson]

In case it helps …

Your Internal Beta Test Program: Opt-in / Opt-out via Self Service

[bethjohnson]

I'm in the process of doing this. My first "early adopters" came from folks in other departments that I collaborate with anyway during the course of my work -- those who have a stake or a partial management role over devices in their departments and want to know what's coming down the pike. For the rest, I've listed all departments and prioritized them by their use of business critical tools. I ran the list by our Helpdesk because they know who the tech-savvy/willing participants are in each department and could suggest folks to introduce the program to. For remaining departments, I'm starting by asking the department coordinator if there's someone they suggest who might join from their department.

My carrot here is that having someone in the program means they get "the early scoop" on updates and changes. I also make sure I do a lot of communication: here's the patches we're testing, here's the new configuration we're testing, here's a thing that's been in the news that we're NOT doing so don't worry about it, etc. We're also not asking anyone to do anything more than use their computer normally and report any issues, so trying to keep the bar very low.