PDQ Deploy

Server installation was straightforward. There is no client agent required. We use the product to install security software daily or weekly.

The license needs to be updated every year, otherwise, the package library does not work as expected.

The software itself works really well. The hard part consists of getting all the machines to talk to each other and then figuring out the silent command -line statements that are needed to install the software. For most of the well-known software, the silent switches are well known and for the most popular tools PDQ will even supply their own scripts.

I'd love PDQ Deploy to re-imagine their local Agent idea. The last time they tried it supposedly didnt meet their standards. I'd say look at other software like Goverlan and even AWS Thinkbox Deadline (a renderfarm manager) to see how they do a local Agent to see if those would meet the criteria. PDQ has no ability to install software that doesn't offer a command-line silent switch. You'd think that this would never come up in Education but... you'd be surprised. We run a lot of 3D and VFX apps that are made by one developer and when you ask them for the silent switches they reply "what are you talking about" . Now, to be sure, this isn't really a "con" of PDQ, but it is fair to mention. If you have any software that just doesn't have any command-line automation which can run silently via a Windows Service User, you'll have to get something alongside PDQ Deploy to make that happen.

Quick to setup deployments and push updated software out

setting up silent installs and deployments for some software is challenging

PDQ is an easy to use tool to scan machines for information on each machine as well as deploying apps. We use it with our deployments to segregate different builds for machines. The ability to deploy powershell scripts, install .exe files and copy files is amazing and very easy.We also calls PDQs API to deploy different things making it a central hub for app deployment. The future will be making a service that users can just call PDQ to deploy an app to them.PDQ connect has a lot of promise, which will allow us to deploy apps that are not connected to our network. Giving us more control beyondAnother plan soon will be to use PDQ for software license counts.PDQ was also easy to setup and migrate to a new server when we wanted to increase the specs of the machine it was on.

They are working towards it now, but the ability to deploy to machines beyond our network is amazing. Giving us information too and status updates on those machines so we can monitor them.Not a con but I do hope they continue adding to their PDQ inventory and API. A future request/project for us is to beable to use PDQ to keep an accurate license count of software. We have some long ideas but would love to use PDQ to keep tabs on everything for us rather than relying on basic data entry.