Deployment component improvements

[jprateragg]

After using the Lansweeper deployment component a few times, it's left me a little disappointed. I think there's lots of room for improvement, and here are some of my ideas:

• I know other people have mentioned this already, but I'll repeat it: I'd like to be able to organize packages into folders. This way we can have folders for specific groups of software or scripts.
  
• I'd like to be able to include other packages inside a package.
  
• Deployments should be broken down into jobs. Whenever you deploy a package, it's a new deployment job for that specific package. From there, you can monitor the status of the assets for that job instead of trying to cherry-pick through the log like it is currently.
  
• There needs to be some sort of controls built into a deployment. I should be able to abort a deployment if the need arises.
  
• I'd like to be able to specify when a package gets deployed directly from the "Deploy" window. Currently, the only option is to deploy it immediately. If I want to deploy it at 6pm, I should have that option.
  
• This expands on the bullet above, but the scheduler is confusing. If I want to deploy a package at 6pm the next day, I have to create a specific schedule for it. Schedules and deployments shouldn't be two separate things--you should literally schedule a package to run directly from the deployment without having separate schedules. Having preset schedules is nice, but the way it's implemented now, it's incredibly cumbersome.
  
• I would like the option to be able to redeploy the package on failed computers (this includes actual failures and computers that were offline). And, if deployments were broken down into jobs, it would make it really easy to do this.
  
• This is a stretch, but it would be great if Lansweeper could synchronize the local package share with the package shares at each IP location. So, whenever anything is added/modified/removed from the main package share, those changed files are propagated to the package shares on the other subnets.
  

I encourage you to look at PDQ Deploy--we currently use it for our deployments because it has all of these robust features. But, I'd like to be able to do all of this within a single product instead of having to maintain two separate products.

[AteaYM]

+1 on most of these comments. I'm new to Lansweeper and I like the deployment feature. It's pretty straight forward but I'm still missing the functionality mentioned by jprateragg. Especially organizing the software into folders, site servers, the ability to filter on offline/online,...
An addition to jprateragg's point could be maximum active deployments/site so that deployments run in batches of x computers. I'm now deploying packages like CAD and office to hunderds of computers at once each time the schedule runs. This causes congestion on the network.