Understanding Deployment Plans

A Deployment Plan allows you to set the order in which Control Manager updates your groups of managed products. With Control Manager, you can implement multiple deployment plans to different managed products at different schedules. For example, during an outbreak involving an email-borne virus, you can prioritize the update of your email scanning software components — such as the latest virus pattern file for Trend Micro ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange.

The Control Manager installation creates two deployment plans:

By default, these plans deploy updates to all products in the Product Directory immediately. Select or create plans from the Manual and Scheduled download pages. Customize these plans, or create new ones, as required by your network. For example, create Deployment Plans according to the nature of the outbreak:

Deploying updates to the Product Directory is separate from the download process. Control Manager downloads the components and performs the deployment plan according to manual or scheduled download settings.

When creating or implementing a deployment plan, consider the following points:

Planning the contents of the Product Directory folders, therefore, becomes very important.

However, you can specify more than one schedule per deployment plan.

For example, if you have three folders that you want to update at five minute intervals, you can assign the first folder a delay of 5 minutes, and then set delays of 10 and 15 minutes for the two remaining folders.