Virtually Jason

I've recently had the opportunity to do a project with VMware UEM where we've made some use of the Run Once setting on a few config items (expect more on that later).  I was hesitant to build that setting into my design though, without having a thorough understanding of what it's doing behind the scenes (for example, what do I do if I need to make it run a second time for some reason?), so I did some research and experimenting. Eventually, I came across a VMware KB Article describing the Run Once Special flag, which explained what was going on, although I still had to poke around a bit to find the file itself and fully understand the behavior.  That article described the Run Once process as creating flag files named .[L-computername.1]  in the hidden FlexRepository user profile folder.  If those files are found for a given setting, it does not run the setting with that flag enabled.  Let's look at an example Logon Task that has Run Once  enabled, and ...

I've been doing more and more work around automation, as have a lot of people in our industry.  But, why do we do it?  Many of the tasks that we automate are trivial, easy things that an administrator can do with very little thought, yet we still invest days, weeks or even months in creating automated systems to do those tasks instead. Well, first lets look at why we automate those trivial tasks.  It turns out that very few tasks are actually trivial, we are just really good at glossing over details.  That's just part of being human and is how we manage to get by in the world.  Take an activity as simple as typing this blog post - trivial, right?  Just type some things into the interface.  Well, discarding any difficulties in figuring out what  to type, think of the pure mechanics of getting it into the interface.  Every character in this post corresponds with a keystroke on my keyboard (and, given how many typos I make and how often I ch...