[BESAdmin-Announcements] Site Relevance Updates - All Fixlet Sites

[Announcements for BES Administrators]

We are preparing for our upcoming release of the IBM Endpoint Manager for
Mobile Devices that will support Android, Apple iOS and other devices. To
support these new devices, we need to update our existing Fixlet sites'
site relevance to exclude these devices and prevent unnecessary content
gathering, storing, and processing.

This should have no effect on any existing devices subscribed to the Fixlet
sites, but a side effect of this change is that some baselines might show a
warning indicating that the underlying Fixlets have changed. You can remove
this warning by synchronizing your baseline with the latest changes. We are
very sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a necessary change that we
need to make and will benefit in the long term.

Here is more detail and background info on site relevance:

Site Relevance -- Background:
In old versions, all agents got all Fixlets and it was up to the agent to
decide whether or not to report the Fixlets relevant even if the the
Fixlets were geared for a different OS. As we released more
sites/platforms, it started to become more common to see that agents were
downloading Fixlet content that seemed like a waste. For instance, Windows
computers would download thousands of Fixlets for RedHat, and so on. It
became more important to avoid using unnecessary disk space, network
traffic, CPU cycles, etc.

Site Relevance -- Solution:
To solve this issue for all platforms, we introduced "site relevance" agent
enhancements into BigFix 7.1. We have since modified site relevance to our
Fixlet sites so that customers could take advantage of the site relevance
benefits. The way this works is that each site will have relevance that
tells the agent whether or not the agent should even care about the site.
For instance, for the Patches for Windows sites, the site relevance is:
if( name of operating system starts with "Win" ) then platform id of
operating system != 3 else false
which means that the agent should not download the site unless it was a
Windows computer that was not a mobile platform. If a
Unix/Linux/Mac/Windows mobile BigFix agent 7.1 and above sees this
relevance, it will not even bother to download the Fixlet site. The
relevance is also applied as "parent relevance" to each Fixlet digest,
which means that you will see it if you look in the console at the Fixlet
details.

--TEM Application Team