Setting Up a Managed Workstation & Lite Touch
The Managed Workstation service has revised and added documentation for the commonly recurring task of setting up a managed workstation, including new documentation for a capability we provide that you may not be familiar with.
What and When:
There are two events in this notification:
- Notification of new documentation for a capability we believe should have been documented previously.
- Notification that there are a few things changing about that capability.
New documentation:
We’ve renamed the ‘Hardware and Repair’ document at https://itconnect.uw.edu/wares/nebula/hardware-2/ to be ‘Setting Up a Managed Workstation’ to make it more clear that this documentation is where you go to find out how to do that task. There are three options listed: full service, self-service via CDW, and self-service via Lite Touch.
Linked from the ‘Setting Up a Managed Workstation’ document, we’ve also added documentation for a self-service option that provides Windows OS image deployment over the UW Network: https://itconnect.uw.edu/wares/nebula/hardware-2/lite-touch/. Some customers have previously been told about this capability, and may be using it, while others have never been advised it exists.
Note: I expect we’ll have future additions to the ‘Setting Up a Managed Workstation’ document, as we are exploring other possible capabilities.
Changes to the Lite Touch capability:
We are retiring the legacy server providing the OS images for the Lite Touch capability, and already have in place a new server that provides up to date OS images. The customer interface provided by the legacy server advises customers to use the new server. Existing customers leveraging the Lite Touch capability should update their existing flash drive to use the new server that provides this capability. The legacy server will be unavailable for customer use after Friday, March 11.
What You Need to Do:
No action is required, unless you are currently leveraging the Lite Touch network-based OS deployment option. If you are, you need to update your existing flash drives before using it. See the Lite Touch documentation noted above for how to get a fresh flash drive.
More Info:
I want to express my apologies to customers who were not previously aware of this capability. Obviously, in the past we failed to document this capability and how you could leverage it. Some customers found out about it by asking, but we really should have represented this capability in our customer documentation before now. The good news is that this is now a capability all Managed Workstation customers can leverage.
Many customers use the self-service via CDW option to get their Managed Workstations setup. If that describes your usual approach, you may want to review your options afresh. The CDW option is excellent if you have little or no IT expertise within your department. If you have more than 5 computers to setup at once, we believe it is more cost effective for you to use the full service option (the CDW supplied image option does cost an incremental amount per computer). Finally, if you do have some IT expertise available within your department, you probably want to consider the self-service via Lite Touch option as that does not require any additional payment.
If you need to rebuild an existing Managed Workstation, the CDW option isn’t possible, so you may find the Lite Touch option is a good fit if you don’t want to pay for the full service option we provide. One scenario where you may need to rebuild an existing Managed Workstation is if it is compromised. Making sure that everyone has a way to rebuild an existing Managed Workstation that does not require the full service option is one of several reasons this gap in documentation came to light. J