As a sysadmin, I have been preparing to sit at home alone for years, hell, that is 80% of my retirement plans (the other 20% is for naps). The issue is, now that the time for social distancing is here, I find that I have always prepped for it for myself only, not with how it might work with the office. Lots of things that I took for granted now require some effort and set up. The most significant gap is with communication, which is critical for business success, and even more important when everyone is remote.
Video chat is important for remote workers
For remote workers, email and chat apps are great for a quick discussion and have their place. When you are dealing with a more nuanced debate, those quickly can derail, and a lot of extra time is spent trying to get your point across. It is easier to have everyone hop onto a video conference and talk out everything for the best way to proceed.
Enter Zoom! First, let me mention Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, has made this product free to schools while they deal with the fallout from COVID-19, so not only is the product excellent, but the people running it are also awesome. Let’s dive into how we can make sure everyone that needs it has it on their desktop.
Installing Zoom
This install is quick and painless, a simple MSI that has universal silent install parameters. A quick command line for the installer would be:
msiexec.exe /i "ZoomInstallerFull.msi" ALLUSERS=1 /qn /norestart /log output.log MSIRESTARTMANAGERCONTROL=”Disable”The only hassle would be getting the MSI where all computers could reach them when you run that install string. Let me help you out with that part. PDQ Deploy! We offer the install package for Zoom with our free version of the software. Just download it from our package library, hit Deploy once, and select the targets that need to have it. I ran a test in that lab, and it completed in 20 seconds.
I know this is where I would add more information, but that is all there is to it. You could download our product and have zoom installing on your workstations in a matter of minutes. Should I add a random fact or something? Did you know cheetahs meow, and it sounds like a house cat?
Conclusion
We have been testing this out for communication, and it is working great. I needed to add some pizazz, so everyone knows I am professional even at the house. I added a tie to my t-shirt, you can’t even tell it is a clip-on! Now get out of here and start communicating, so everyone knows the status of the latest TPS reports.
Check out our video reference on how to easily deploy Zoom to multiple computers here.
