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ZENworks 2017 Update 1--now in beta with an expected release date in June--provides significant enhancements to ZENworks Full Disk Encryption. Here are the highlights of what’s new, what’s changed, and what you should know as you prepare to roll out ZENworks Full Disk Encryption 2017 Update 1.
Your rollout depends on whether you are installing ZENworks Full Disk Encryption 2017 Update 1 to a new (unencrypted) device or to a currently encrypted device.
If you are encrypting a new (unencrypted) device, all you need to do is ensure that the device is one of the supported platforms and meets the system requirements. The Update 1 Full Disk Encryption Agent is installed to the device during the ZENworks agent update (or initial installation for newly managed devices); once it is installed, it is ready to encrypt the device according to the Disk Encryption policy you assign to the device.
If you are updating a device that is currently encrypted, you will need to decrypt the device before updating to the ZENworks 2017 Update 1 agent.
Decryption only needs to be done this one time. Once Update 1 is on a device, new updates (for example, ZENworks 2017 Update 2) can be installed without decrypting the device. This release requires the device to be decrypted because we had to change the ZENworks partition size to support the new Linux kernel size and related files. It’s large enough now to avoid this issue in the future.
We recognize that decrypting and re-encrypting a device is no small task. Because of that, when the ZENworks agent is updated on a device, we won’t update the Full Disk Encryption agent if that device has a Disk Encryption policy applied. In other words, if the device is encrypted, we won’t update it and it will continue to be encrypted with the current ZENworks version (for example, ZENworks 2017, 11.4.3, 11.4.2, and so on). While we encourage you to update all devices, this approach allows you to focus on devices that need updating while delaying (or excluding) the update of a device if:
Our ZENworks Full Disk Encryption team is developing a detailed Update guide to provide you with the information and instructions needed to successfully update. This will be available on our ZENworks 2017 doc site when Update 1 releases in June.
You can look forward to more exciting enhancements in future releases of ZENworks Full Disk Encryption. Check back after the Update 1 release for a sneak peak at what we plan for Update 2.