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Session Manager
Overview

The Best Systems Management Approach for the Front Lines

The systems your frontline employees rely on—their laptops, handhelds, and point of sale systems—are only intermittently connected to your corporate network. This kind of computing paradigm necessitates a different type of systems management approach, a session-oriented approach. Session Manager, a key component of Afaria, uses this session-oriented approach, allowing you to automate business processes and increase communication efficiency for intermittently connected devices and systems. A flexible, scalable management software solution for companies of every size, Session Manager efficiently and centrally manages the complex tasks associated with enterprise-wide distributed systems management.

Using Session Manager, you can automate electronic file distribution, file and directory management, notifications, and system registry management tasks without having to learn a programming language. It provides efficient file transfers, fault tolerant communications, incremental updates, and checkpoint restart for your desktop, laptop, and handheld devices.

Session Manager is organized using a transmitter/channel paradigm. Channels consist of worklists and sendlists: organized, reusable groups of events that correspond to specific tasks which are scripted to occur when the client connects to the transmitter (server). A wide range of real-time processes can be automated through these events, including:

  • Automating data retrieval from, or data delivery to, mobile devices
  • Syncing worker-specific content and data between the frontline device and headquarters (with or without end user involvement)
  • Connecting frontline solutions to backend legacy applications and data
  • Automating electronic file distribution
  • Automating pre- and post-software distribution processes
  • Enhancing application self-healing
  • Enforcing processes and policies, such as anti-virus policies
  • Taking condition-based actions, such as locking down or deleting data from devices identified as lost or stolen

Session Manager offers an easy-to-use graphical scripting tool that’s designed for system administrators, not programmers. All of your Session Manager channels, worklists, and sendlists are displayed in a tree structure so you can visually organize your channels and their components. Session Manager’s scripting tool can automate communication sessions; organize file and directory management tasks, such as file push and pull; change file attributes; automate processes using conditional business logic; detect connection speed; update registries; and generate alerts and messages.

Session Manager gives you visibility to session activity and file transfer activity. It lets you create custom systems management tasks and specify when a given worklist, sendlist, or event is available for execution. You can fine-tune worklists and sendlists, decreasing session completion time by pre-processing tasks that can be performed on the client device before a session begins.

Session Manager provides optimal device and application availability, performance and reliability to your employees, no matter where their work takes them or what devices they’re using. By doing so, it lowers the cost of system maintenance while freeing your employees to focus on strategically important tasks, not the technology they use to support those tasks.