Run Advertised Programs -> Software Center
The Managed Workstation Service is upgrading the software we use to deploy applications to managed workstations.
What and When
Beginning April 5th through April 19th, we will be migrating all managed workstations to a new management infrastructure which provides improved capabilities.
Most of the improvements won’t be visible, however, this will change how you install additional applications on your computer. A new “Software Center” will replace ‘Run Advertised Programs’. While Software Center is functionally similar to ‘Run Advertised Programs’, the Software Center provides a better user experience and is more fully integrated into Windows 10. The link in the More Info section describes the Software Center user experience.
The migrations of managed workstations to this new management infrastructure will start on April 5th and will take up to two weeks to complete. During this time, there is no change in behavior or service for those computers that haven’t yet migrated—they will continue to use the ‘Run Advertised Programs’ mechanism until migrated.
What you need to do
No immediate action is required. Prior to your computer migrating, software will remain available via “Run Advertised Programs”. Once your computer has migrated, the new “Software Center” will become available.
More Info
See https://itconnect.uw.edu/wares/nebula/software/ for more info on Software Center. If you need to reference the old instructions for Run Advertised Programs, that will remain available at https://itconnect.uw.edu/wares/nebula/news/software-old/#RunAdvertisedPrograms until the end of April.
This change represents a lot of work we’ve been doing behind the scenes to keep the infrastructure we provide current and relevant. The user experience change noted here is accompanied by a number of new capabilities which we’ll look to leverage in the coming year. We’ve also started work to deploy a duplicate of this management infrastructure in the NETID domain so we are ready to begin computer migrations later this year. We’ll let you know more about new capabilities when they are relevant, but this is a good opportunity to let you know that we continue to invest in improving what we provide to you.