Let us look at a scenario at ABC Corporation to depict the usage of ZENworks 11 SP3 Share and Subscribe feature.

ABC Corporation’s environment is divided into two zones - a Lab Zone and a Production zone. Tom is the administrator of the Lab Zone & Jim is the administrator of production zone.

ABC Corporation has a practice of creating & testing the bundles and policies in their lab zone before using them in their Production zone. Tom is an expert in creating & testing bundles and policies in lab zone. One fine day, Jim meets Tom and discusses with him on the new requirements in his production zone.

Based on the discussion, Tom creates several bundles and policies in his Lab zone.

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After multiple iterations and tests he is finally satisfied with the objects created in his zone. This entire process takes him around a week. After a week he meets Jim again and tells him that the bundles and policies are ready to use.

Jim is interested in using these objects in his production zone and plans to start with couple of bundles and polices.

And now as there is no easy way to copy these objects from Lab to Production Zone, Jim & Tom decide to recreate them again in the Production zone.

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So for ABC corporation, the entire process of creating & testing these bundles & policies first in the lab zone & recreating them in production zone takes several weeks and depends on the number of objects required.

This means they are taking time away from their core business activities.

Also sometimes this process of recreating these objects can be error prone.

To solve such pain-points, ZENworks 11 SP3 introduces the new share and subscribe feature that enables administrators like Tom & Jim to share & subscribe bundles and policies across multiple zones.

The zone that shares the objects is called sharing zone and the zone that subscribes to get the objects is called subscribing zone. In case of ABC Corporation, Lab zone is the sharing zone and the Production zone is the subscribing zone.

Steps to use this new ZENworks 11 SP3 feature –

1. Tom identifies one of his primary server TPS1 as a sharing server & configures for sharing

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2. Create a subscription key, provide the sharing server & the subscription key details to Jim; This is done through email or phone or meeting in person

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3. Jim creates a new ZENworks subscription to Lab zone using the details provided by Tom

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4. Lab zone validates the credentials and accepts the subscription & Tom shares several bundles and policies with production zone

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5. Jim reviews the shared objects and selects only those that are important to him in his production zone. He selects Bundle BL1, BW1, and Policy Ply1 & Ply3 and replicates them to his zone. Replication is a process of copying these objects from lab zone to production zone

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After replication, if any of these objects are using any zone specific variables or values, Jim will be notified of them. For example bundle BW1 seems to be using a variable that is specific to Lab zone. Jim now has an option to review them and take corrective actions by mapping them to a value that is suited for his production zone

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This feature also provides an option for Jim & Tom to configure the throttle rate for replication of objects between these zones. They can either increase it or decrease it.

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And for organizations like ABC Corporation this sharing and subscribing of objects between multiple zones can be an on-going process and administrators like Jim have an option to create a regular subscription schedule.

In case there are multiple subscribers, the administrator of sharing zone also has an option to configure multiple servers for sharing and to organize subscribers by creating subscriber groups or folders.

To summarize

Summary of steps –Sharing Zone

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Steps 2 & 3 can be inter-changed.

Summary of steps –Subscribing Zone

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Steps 2 & 4 can be inter-changed.

"The below video depicts the scenario at ABC Corporation"

Overview of Share and Subscribe in ZENworks 11 SP3