I am out at customer site this week and I learned something pretty cool from Craig Wilson that I thought I’d share with everyone. This is a little known fact that even engineering didn’t seem to know and could have huge wins for many customers. As I’m sure you are aware, starting in ZENworks 11SP2 we introduced the notion of Action level system requirements. This allows you to do cool things like have a single bundle that includes both a 32-bit and a 64-bit installer. However, in its default configuration a bundle configured in this manner will cache all of the content (both the 32-bit and 64-bit installers) associated with the bundle when the user launches it. This is because by default the bundle is setup to distribute all of the files that the bundle may need in order to install vs the ones it needs right now.

It turns out though, that if you don’t need to pre-distribute content (on a Distribution schedule separate from the Install/Launch) then you can actually configure the bundle in such a way that only the content associated with the actions that pass system requirements will be downloaded. To do this you simply have to disable the Distribute Files action in the Distribute action set, as shown below:



Once you have disabled the Distribute Files action you can then assign it to your users. As long as you use either a Launch Schedule or wait for the user to launch the application, then when the application runs it will only cache the content for the actions in the Install and Launch actions that meet the specified system requirements.

If you configure a distribution schedule then nothing occurs because no actions are enabled in the action set. Again thanks to Craig, this isn’t something I even thought about since we exposed the Distribution action set in the ZENworks 11SP3. This is an oft requested capability.