Take an innovative approach to application packaging and testing, starting with the tools to ensure an effective application owner program, and then by empowering application owners to initiate package automation, IT professionals can focus on more complex applications and streamline the packaging and testing of third-party updates. This makes keeping up with updates possible in a way not previously possible, enhancing security and productivity within organizations.
The challenge of managing a large application portfolio
Keeping current with application updates helps ensure a productive and secure application estate, but large volumes of updates are announced weekly. So, in an organization with several hundred applications under management, keeping up with so many updates is an elusive goal.
Until relatively recently, a small team was responsible for watching them all. Email and social media announcements, blogs, webinars, newsletters, etc., became unhelpful noise when monitoring such large volumes of applications.
Organizations resigned to reactively updating applications following the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities and all but gave up on prioritizing less critical and functional application updates. Vulnerable versions with lower risk might take weeks or months as the need for higher criticality updates constantly rolled in.
A popular solution: application owners
A common solution these days is to implement an application owner program. By having hundreds of people watch hundreds of applications, what was noise now becomes valuable data. A proactive approach to updates becomes possible, and an ability to stay up to date and achieve an evergreen application portfolio is within reach!
But this has been a solution with challenges of its own
There have been no tools to help govern and ensure the value of application owner initiatives, leading to a situation where...
- Enterprises are often unsure that all applications that should have an owner are being monitored.
- Organizations report low confidence that many of those tasked with watching for updates are actually doing so.
- They find it challenging to quantify the output of the effort due to the open-ended nature of what is being requested.
But now, there is a simple and low-cost solution that effectively eliminates each of these challenges: Juriba App Owner
Now, with Juriba App Owner
Managers can now get a birds-eye view of the organization's application owner initiative and gain confidence in its effectiveness and the value being delivered.
- As application owners depart the organization and new applications are introduced, you can clearly confirm desired coverage. Not every app needs an owner, so App Owner allows you to filter away those that are not applicable so you can focus on what matters.
- Set application check-in intervals in bulk or individually as desired and quickly identify applications that fall outside defined goals.
- By collecting check-in details with a consistent, simple form, you can now measure the output of your application owner program in ways previously not possible.
- Application Owners are sent email reminders to check in, where they complete a simple, one-page form identifying the status of updates and their recommendation for implementing available updates.
- Application owners enjoy a simple interface where it is easy to see what applications are assigned when check-ins are due and perform such check-ins
Empower application owners to do even more with Juriba App Readiness
With a successful app owner program in place, you can now effectively identify what applications should be updated, but your packaging experts struggle to keep up with the need to prepare and test so many updates.
This bottleneck is a reality for most enterprises, driving interest in automation solutions like App Packager. A key differentiator for our solution is that it is not built for IT professionals but for the average user, so you can spread the preparation and testing workload just as you have that of monitoring applications!
Some applications can take hours, days, or weeks to effectively research, prepare, test, and deploy, which is too much for a small team of experts to maintain. Due to the complex nature of application packaging, testing, and deployment, too small of a team has had to have their hands on every update, leading to a bottleneck that forces compromise that leads to reactive prioritization and focus on only the most critical of updates.
But times have changed. These days, many applications can be fully automated, and application owners can add just a few more minutes of effort to deflect the majority of applications from the packaging team.
If the application owner recommends an update in App Owner, they can be optionally prompted to provide the vendor setup file in App Packager, and Juriba’s intelligent automation takes it from here. Automating the selection of package formats and test systems, all of which are dictated by admin settings.
After automated smoke testing, we can also facilitate interactive quality testing. The testing process is automatically documented with screenshots and recordings. All complexity is hidden from the user.
- When a setup is uploaded to App Readiness, it automatically assesses the installation for silent command line details and then runs automated smoke testing to validate success.
- Should this approach fail, you may optionally have the application owner click through the application's interactive installation wizard, and we will capture the results to create a custom, silent deployment package. This, too, is then automatically tested to validate success.
- Soon, Juriba AI will also be able to do this automatically! For details and a quick demo, see Juriba AI: Pioneering the Future of Application Management Automation
- Packages that succeed and make their way to the Publish Queue can be manually or automatically published to ConfigMan or Intune for pilot testing and deployment.
While most applications can be automated in this way, some complex deployments that require expertise remain, and this much smaller, more manageable workload will remain in the hands of IT professionals.
Juriba App Owner beta version has just been released, and you can now sign up for early access and start addressing many of the common challenges faced by organizations struggling to realize an effective application owner implementation.