Do you have trouble delivering software and OS updates, patches, and applications to remote corners of your enterprise network? Are you tired of tying up the network when large packages are pushed? We think there is a better way. Follow along as we take you on journey to show you what your network could be. A journey we like to call “A day in the life of a ConfigMgr Admin.”

“Set it and forget it” with K4CM

Your company recently installed Kollective for ConfigMgr (K4CM). The Kollective integration is enabled through SCCMs Alternate Content Provider API, also known as ACP. Once our publisher is installed on your site server and our agent on your endpoints, it is “set it and forget it.”

Let’s imagine your organization went live with our system yesterday, and you hit send on a software update package at the end of the workday. When you get to the office this morning, you are anxious to see how your package delivery performed. You login to the Kollective platform and here is what you see:

The package has been distributed across the network by utilizing Kollective For ConfigMgr, our cloud-based content delivery solution, which requires no additional hardware, professional services, or lengthy setup. In the past, this delivery may have taken days to complete, but now it happens within hours. You can easily see where your package was delivered geographically, to how many machines, and how much bandwidth was saved.

Terabytes of bandwidth savings

The Kollective for ConfigMgr agent shows 79% peering for this delivery. For the 2134 machines that were targeted, what would normally require 4.835 GB to deliver the package, only used 1.015GB. This is a 79% reduction in the amount of bandwidth required and is accomplished by transferring the load from the WAN to the LAN.

This is a relatively small package; imagine the bandwidth savings and network effects on a 4GB Win10 Quality update. The savings from just that one delivery will be measured in terabytes. How many deliveries like this do you do a month? Someone in your organization is likely accustomed to calculating how much additional bandwidth will cost – this is a rare opportunity to calculate how much bandwidth can be saved, and what that equates to in dollars saved.

Intelligent mesh peering means no “single point of failure”

One factor to keep in mind is that you no longer require a distribution point for many of these locations, and have thus removed a “single point of failure”. With Kollective, machines coordinate with one another to transfer content over the WAN once and then share the content with one another using our mesh peering technology. In addition, our real-world experience shows that a K4CM customer can expect a 90+% reduction in software delivery related helpdesk tickets, leading to significant workplace efficiency gains due to a reduction in time spent chasing down failed deliveries. Allowing your employees to do their job rather than fixing problems is significant in terms of employee satisfaction and real cost savings.

Have a remote office in Alaska that you are concerned about? As you can see in the image above, this package was safely delivered on the LAN side in the Anchorage office and got there without shutting down mission-critical traffic due to the agents’ ability to dynamically throttle when it detects higher priority traffic. You won’t receive frantic calls from your Network Team that the package you are managing is shutting down the network. The machines in this office, just like the machines in every other office, are sharing the package data amongst themselves using our intelligent mesh-peering solution.

The Kollective process allows a machine to get content from the nearest acceptable peer and is broken up into blocks. Here is how it works: imagine an employee has a machine that is downloading content over the WAN and then “serving” other machines as the “LAN leader” (in the background, and unbeknownst to her). She decides to grab her machine and head out for the day. Another Kollective agent will immediately resume the WAN download and begin serving that content to other peers.

Are you considering adopting Cloud Management Gateways for remote users or “Internet Only” remote offices? at some of these remote offices? As a 100% cloud-based solution, Kollective for ConfigMgr can support peering when using a CMG, providing the ability to manage clients on the internet outside of the traditional organization network perimeter. Since the Kollective Agent doesn’t require network mapping or boundary groups, groups of users in remote locations can effectively peer with one another las if they were within your network boundaries. This allows for far more efficient and effective software delivery.

All of this happens automatically, and the agent gets smarter over time. The days of boundary group mapping are over. There is no need to create or maintain boundary groups, as the agent will automatically go find the content it needs from the nearest peer that has it. After a few deliveries, each agent will remember where it got the content the last time and look there first. Thus, the agent gets “smarter” over time, making deliveries more efficient and saving more bandwidth. It is not unusual to see peering rates of over 90%, which leads to some amazing savings when you factor in the number of machines targeted and the size of the packages.

Drilling down into the details

Where did the package go? Let’s take a look… Gone are your days of pulling logs to see what happened. K4CM allows you to start from the top and get broad information about where the package was sent. From there, you can drill down to easily find out what countries were targeted, what offices, and even what machines.

You can also determine what machine was serving as the LAN leader, what machines were pulling content from that leader, and figure out if a machine or office is acting outside of expectations.

As the GM for Kollective for ConfigMgr, I’m pretty excited about what our product can offer you. From the costs savings and workplace efficiencies to real and useful network insights, Kollective can help you distribute packages without hassle, freeing you up to focus on other mission-critical tasks.

Now that you have witnessed a day in the life of a ConfigMgr Admin, why not give us a spin to see if K4CM is right for you with our 60-Day Free Trial .