Best Method to Advertise Given My Circumstances

[BzowK]

Good Afternoon All & Niall -

 

I have found myself creating many advertisement recently. Each week, I advertise at least one advertisement to our company. There are ~700 workstations on the domain and management wants to deploy only a few per day to keep things safe. We have a deployment schedule that 90% of deployed items use (especially those with reboots) which is as follows:

 

Current Deployment Collections (Groups)

• Day 1 - Test Workstations - Thursday/Week 1 - 11:00pm - 6:00am
• Day 2 - All IT Workstations - Friday/Week 1 - 11:00pm - 6:00am
• Day 3 - Main Office Floors 6 & 7 - Monday/Week 2 - 11:00pm - 6:00am
• Day 4 - Main Office Floors 23, 24, & 25 - Tuesday/Week 2 - 11:00pm - 6:00am
• Day 5 - Main Office Floors 26, 27, 28, & 29 - Wednesday/Week 2 - 11:00pm - 6:00am
• Day 6 - Remote Workstations & Main Office - Thursday/Week 2 - 11:00pm - 6:00am (Re-advertises to main office)
• Day 7 - Remote Workstations & Main Office - Friday/Week 2 - 11:00pm - 6:00am (Re-advertises to all)

 

Because of this, I must create an advertisement for each of the above "deployment groups" per deployment, per day for just one week. That equals a lot of setting up time.

 

What I've Tried (Using Maintenance Windows)

 

I recently tried using Maintenance Windows to hopefully alleviate some of this work. I took the 7 deployment groups above and set a re-occuring Maintenance Window for each of them for the day and time they were to deploy items. I then created 2 "Advertisement Groups" without Maintenance Windows below:

• Advertisement Group #1 - Contains all members in collections 1-5
• Advertisement Group #2 - Contains all members in collections 6 & 7

Due to the 7 being over a two week period, I had to use two groups, not just one. My hope was that the members of the two advertisement collections would use the maintenance windows from the Deployment Collections which they are a part of - however - I don't think I thought it through enough as it did not work.

When I tested a deployment with this method (Adobe Flash update), most of the workstations got it overnight.

I think the problem is that the member's Maintenance Windows from the other collections are either not being used - or - since Deployment Groups 6 & 7 open the maintenance window for all workstations that it worked fine, but allowed deployment to all of them.

Overall

Long story short, given that I have ~700 workstations, currently 7 deployment groups, but only 5 days to deploy; what would be the best method to set up advertisements?

 

Thanks Guys!