My Bigfix Wishlist
I love BigFix and I use it for almost everything, but it has some things that need improvement, and this post is about what I think are the biggest missing pieces.
- DEP & MDM: BigFix needs to provide an easy way to be deployed through MDM for both Windows & Mac.
- Provide an option to use a free MDM and deploy bigfix through the MDM, and support DEP / AzureAD Enrollment
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Provide documentation for doing the same with some 3rd party MDMs including MAAS360, Casper, Intune.
- Relays need to be easier, especially for small deployments that shouldn’t have to worry about it.
- Peer to peer file transfer should be an option, especially now that Windows 10 does this for Windows Updates by default.
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Relays currently offer a lot of control and flexibility, but at the cost of overhead that is a lot to bear for small deployments.
- Too Many Servers for all of the parts of BigFix
- The core platform really only needs 1 server, but if you want all of the features, you need many
- Breaking out the servers by function is in many ways a very good thing to be able to do, but having many servers is a burden for small deployments
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Use something like docker / containerization to make the infrastructure more self-managing and lighter weight.
- Improve MultiTenancy
- This is already a strength of BigFix, but it could definitely be better and isn’t supported by every part of it.
Relevance Inspectors
Mac specific
The mac needs some love, especially in inspectors.
- Profiles
- This is critical for modern MacOS managment.
- XML
- Other OSes have this, this is a big omission.
- OSQuery
Windows specific
Universal