Over the last 18 months, our engineering team has moved quickly and adapt to the changing demands of today’s hybrid work environments, particularly for large enterprises who have had to drastically scale up the number of endpoints and employees working from outside of their corporate networks. We are pleased to share our first major version release in years, SmartDeploy 3.0.
SmartDeploy 3.0 has been completely rebuilt from the ground up as a brand-new application, retaining all of the same functionality you’ve used in the past, but with some major architectural updates to improve performance, reliability, and security. We’ve added a few things, improved a lot of things, and built a robust back-end for many exciting new features down the road.
Top 5 architecture updates
SmartDeploy 3.0 is designed with a cloud-first architecture, starting with vastly simplified network requirements. Rather than the half-dozen arbitrary ports we’ve used in the past, we switched to using only standard HTTPS for client-console communications. This is going to make communication much more reliable, and feasible without extra configurations or troubleshooting for nearly all network environments right out of the box.
All client communication have switched from using SOAP calls to a REST API. This will make a huge difference for customers with a large number of clients (particularly a thousand or more), who should see substantial improvement in performance and reduction of CPU and memory usage on the console host.
Your SmartDeploy console will also have a brand new database provider under the hood. We have switched from SQL Server Express LocalDB to the much more scalable and reliable MongoDB. This makes troubleshooting and remediation of problems much easier for your technicians and for our support team, so if there is an issue, we can get you back to imaging and pushing out apps that much faster.
We have also simplified file transfer! We are no longer using Net.TCP to transfer files used in deployment, such as boot and install images. You may have previously found that this protocol was blocked at your site, depending on your security configuration, so this should no longer be an issue.
One more change under the hood: the two standalone applications which allow you to build and edit Platform Packs and Application Packs have been re-tooled to use .NET Core in place of older frameworks, which will not only improve performance, but also make it easier for us to update and add features in the future.
SmartDeploy 3.0 upgrade guide
We’ve also added an entire section on upgrading to SmartDeploy 3.0 to the Support Center. There you’ll will find instructions and a short video detailing exactly how to migrate your existing libraries and clients from SmartDeploy V2 to V3, which you should find simple and painless because it can be installed alongside your existing V2 console without any interruption in functionality. I recommend upgrading a few test endpoints to the V3 client and when you are satisfied that the new V3 console is behaving exactly the way you need it to, you can proceed to upgrade the rest of your clients and uninstall the V2 console.
The SmartDeploy support team, myself included, is here to help with any questions or issues that you may encounter when installing V3. If you’re new to SmartDeploy and looking for a way to manage diverse hardware in a hybrid environment, download and install SmartDeploy to take it for a test drive.
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