Whether a user is a mobile employee who travels frequently, a corporate office employee, or a work-from-home employee, you want to ensure that the user is connecting to the right ZENworks server, that the correct applications are available, and that the appropriate security policies are being applied to protect the device in its current network environment. ZENworks 11 allows you to create locations that are used by ZENworks Adaptive Agent to determine what should be available or enforced on a managed device.
A location can represent a specific place, such as Corporate Office Building A, or a type of place, such as Office, depending on your configuration and security needs. A location is a collection of network environments. Each network environment definition identifies a set of conditions (gateways, DNS servers, wireless access points, and so on) that, when matched by a device’s current network environment, associates the device to the location.
For example, assume that you have an office in New York and an office in Tokyo. Both offices have the same security requirements. You create an Office location and associate it with two network environments: New York Office Network and Tokyo Office Network. Each of these environments is explicitly defined by a set of wireless access point MAC addresses. Whenever the device determines that its current environment matches the New York Office Network or Tokyo Office Network, it sets its location to Office and applies the configuration and security settings associated with that location.
Administrators can create, delete, and modify locations and network environments only if the relevant locations rights have been assigned to them by the Super Administrator. By default, the administrators do not have the rights to create, delete, and modify locations and network environments. For more information about assigning rights to administrators, see Section 3.2, Managing Administrator Rights.