Policy Management: Automating Systems Management Policies

An effective policy management tool allows policies to be designed to save IT departments both time and money by having the ability to automate routine tasks. This type of customization capability requires granular level enforcement and control on each individual desktop, with enough intelligence built-in so that the IT management process is automated and simplified as much as possible. For example, if a laptop were to be stolen or lost, administrators can automatically control and disable the ability for anyone to log into that PC.

Setting up policies is easy. Our intuitive wizard-based interface allows you to configure multi-dimensional policies based upon any combination of groupings, including:

• Applications
• Departments
• Active Directory User/Group
• Connectivity Status (on/off corporate network)
• Time of Day

Policies are completely automated, for example, when one user is moved into a different group, the policy settings for that group are immediately effective and enforced for that user's logon credentials.

Try it now for 14 days. In four easy steps and in less than ten minutes, the software can be installed and ready for evaluation.

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Additional Control for Your Desktop Environment

Viewfinity provides the capability for IT Administrators to centrally control the operation of laptops and desktops automatically. A typical PC left on for 24 hours each day can use $87 or more of energy per year. Turned off at night and weekends, it will only use around $22 of energy per year. In order to lower power costs during non-business hours, Viewfinity can be configured to automatically power down PCs after a specified duration. Or if you need to automatically log users off at a certain time to kick off tasks such as a system back up, a policy can be created to perform an automatic logoff function for a group of computers at a pre-scheduled time.

Setting up computer policies is simple and straightforward using Viewfinity’s policy wizard. As the IT administrator, all you need to do is go through a few steps and identify the proper variables to build your policy: select the group of computers, the type of management task, set the time/schedule. Once configured, the policy is in effect for all current group members and any new PCs added to the group.

Customize Control of Your Environment

In addition to the built-in capabilities that are available, IT administrators may develop custom scripts to control various aspects of their desktop environment.

Viewfinity Support for Delegated Security

Viewfinity products provide delegated management control to support the needs of your various IT roles and staff members. The primary Viewfinity Administrator account has authorization to manage all computers in the organization. This primary account can create separate computer subsets based on departments, regions, and other criteria and assign management control of these subsets to specific individuals. Each subset administrator can deploy agents, apply policies, and report on computers which fall under his/her management.

Viewfinity supports two levels of system management accounts. Full control system management accounts have complete access to product features such as the ability to create, stop, start, and modify policies; deploy agents and monitor activity. Read only accounts are targeted for subset administrators which require “review only access” including activities such as viewing reports and monitoring policy and asset management reports, reviewing computer connectivity status, etc.