What is a policy?

In Mattrax a policy is a set of rules that define the expected state of a device. Mattrax will take care of enforcing these rules for you.
A policy consists of a collection of:

• A device configurations such as firewall rule, network setting, disk encryption configuration, taskbar/dock layout, etc
• A script (Bash or Powershell) with a schedule to run it on

Why would I want my policies versioned?

There is many reasons why you might want this.

Ship with confidence

You can deploy changes to your fleet with the confidence that you can undo it or track it down easily.
If something goes wrong with a change, you can roll back to the previous version quickly to mitigate the disruption to users.
If many users are reporting issues you can check the activity feed to quickly narrow down the issue and put a stop to it.

Collaboration

When working with a team of people, it's important to all be on the same page and versions help with that.
You can see who made what changes and when and also leave a message on changes to provide context to your team.
An activity feed on the dashboard allows everyone to keep on the same page about changes being rolled out to your fleet.

Better testing

While policies are in a draft state you can quickly apply them to a test device to see the changes in action.
This allows you to test changes in a real-world environment without affecting other devices or users that the policy is applied to. We also ensure the deploy is done with a high-priority because no one wants to be left wait around for the changes to apply.

What are policy templates?

An MDM is more than just managing the operating system, it's about managing the software that runs on it. Policy templates are a way to define how to deploy, configure and licence software. Software vendors or 3rd party contributors can provide definitions that instruct Mattrax how to deploy, configure and licence their software.