After more than 6 months of exhaustive testing in sandbox environments, we’re happy to announce, that last week marked the official roll-out of a utility named ‘Ninite’ across the Varidan network.
The implementation of this utility reflects a long standing, core value of ours – The exploration and use of the latest technologies. We firmly believe that it is necessary to keep up to date with changing markets and always push to find more cost-effective and efficient methods to help our clients without compromising operational functionality.
Ninite services millions of home users across the globe, updating over 500,000 programs each day, with professional subscribers including the likes of NASA and the Harvard Medical School. Thus far, Ninite has more than proven its worth. Its ease of implementation, up-keep and cost-effectiveness speaks volumes about the quality of product.
So, what is Ninite? Ninite is a handy little number that allows us to run silent installations1 of commonly required applications and their updates on Windows workstations via automated scripting. One major feature of Ninite is that it uses bots2 at the host server to trawl for the latest iterations of software to be installed.
Typically, we schedule Ninite scripts around 9:30pm on a Wednesday evening, along with patch roll-outs and other scheduled maintenance. Installations can also be run during office hours, with negligible impact to the end user. We can run a single installation, or queue up several and we can pick and choose from a diverse list of software.
For example, our basic package script, which is generally run on newly purchased computers to get them up to speed, will install essentials such as Java, Flash, Cute PDF, Shockwave and several more items, in a non-conflicting sequence and only takes about 15-30 minutes depending on the system resources available.
So, what does this mean for Varidan and its clients? For Varidan, this means more time is available for our technicians to tend to proactive tasks and less time on reactive tasks. For our clients, this means there is less operational down-time and at no cost whatsoever!
Yes, you read correctly! Varidan has decided to offer Ninite functionality for free, to all our Silver and Gold clients. At an annual cost of approximately $15 per workstation, our larger clients will definitely save quite a few pennies and more importantly, the value of the time saved will be immeasurable.
Since Ninite can be customised to suit individual clients’ needs, we’d like to maximise the use of this functionality, so a questionnaire will be sent to all system owners in the near future, in order to determine what programs are most in demand and if there are other programs that are out of the default selection list, but that the clients would like to see. Your feedback is essential to making the most of this technology, so stay tuned!
We hope to be able to carry on bringing great initiatives and services such as Ninite in future to all our clients, to boost productivity and maintain our commitment to quality.
1 – For the uninitiated, a silent installation is one that runs in the background “silently” without any visible disruption to the end user. As with any installation, there is a negligible diversion of resources as the installations are run.
2 – A ‘bot’, short for robot, is a software application that runs automated tasks. Typically, they perform simple and repetitive tasks at a much higher rate than what a human could achieve. In this instance the bots analyse information from the respective web servers for changes in the available installation files.
Very good,
Cheers