This past year at VMware Explore, we received a demo of the Workspace ONE Marketplace led by people like Shawn Bass and the recently departed Brian Link. In retrospect, they probably undersold the part of this that really matters (Freestyle Orchestrator’s debut into WS1 Intelligence). Recently, VMware has released the Marketplace, which I have done a deep-dive on. Today, we’re going to discuss some of the basics of that review and just how special it could be.

What is the Workspace ONE Marketplace?

You could argue that the Marketplace is a refresh of Workspace ONE Intelligence overall. They have hit Intelligence with a nice facelift, which you can see from the UI.

It’s easy to see that the entire navigation is vastly improved. In your workspace, you much more easily access your items, which have been organized logically with services at the forefront. This is a step in the right direction from the previous design.

You can see within the Marketplace tab that their core solutions at accentuated with DEX/DEEM/whatever its called this week and their templates (more about those later). A neat thing about “Experience Management” is that it calls out if you haven’t fully enabled DEX in a particular area:

I had setup DEX, but I hadn’t enabled the scoring, which it reminded me to do here. They’ve also incorporated some nice video demos and blogs to get people more interested in these components:

They’re also throwing stuff like vulnerability management more at the forefront. On the security side, it’s nice to announce they finally have Login Risk Score inside of Intelligence, which we had been waiting for. By coupling things like this and vulnerability management with the new introduction of Freestyle Orchestrator (FSO) into Intelligence you can bring things together quite nicely.

One fun example I can think of is force patching to do its thing when you aren’t having great success. You could for example push down PSWindowsUpdate to devices and use that to install Windows Updates with some basic code like this below. Keep in mind it will require you to use products instead of scripts:

Get-WindowsUpdate -KBArticleID {PassKBArticleID} -Install -AcceptAll -AutoReboot

Considering Microsoft is moving away from update approvals, this could be a fun little way of addressing patching issues when you just can’t get a patch to install. I haven’t done much with that module lately, but it gives an example of how dynamic things can be now. Let’s go into a demo of the new Marketplace.

Workspace ONE Marketplace Demo

Freestyle Orchestrator Reinvigorates WS1 Intelligence

The true happy accident with all of this is how much more relevant Freestyle Orchestrator is. In WS1 Intelligence, Freestyle is now device agnostic. So the device isn’t really relevant. We are now looking at an API driven-model. We focus on data sources, which can be one of these:

Now, you can use literally any piece of data that lives in the WS1 Intelligence Data Lake to filter to what you want to target.

Once you have figured out what you are looking for, such as these examples:

1. Devices that have enrolled in the last 7 days
2. CVEs that are over 7.0
3. Dell Battery Health under 35%

You can then trigger API commands, like:

1. Send Hub Notifications
2. Install a Profile
3. Force Reprocess a Product
4. Create Tickets in ServiceNow or Jira
5. Send Teams or Slack notifications

The pure flexibility is huge, but it also comes at a cost. You can’t use most of the commands you can use in UEM with Orchestrator, but with talented and creative API access you can do almost anything you put your mind to. The reality with this is they must now start driving more available custom connectors/data sources into Intelligence to make this as powerful as it can be. Let’s cut to the demo!

API-Driven Freestyle Orchestrator Demo

Templates Reborn

Templates aren’t as exciting at this juncture as I would hope they would be. So, you can break them down into 3 buckets: Widgets, Reports, Workflows.

Widgets and Reports have been there for the most part. They do continue to grow them and expand on the offer, but mostly the workflow templates are what matter. The real expansion that we need is on connectors like I mentioned earlier. The available workflows as of today are decent and call out some key needs for many companies like:

1. Fixing Devices that have Secure Boot Disabled.
2. Approving Windows Updates.
3. Low Device Storage Notifications
4. Sending Notifications for Pending Reboots

Now, we can roll forward into our final demo.

Workspace ONE Templates Demo

Final Thoughts

So, I have to admit I wasn’t all that excited about the Marketplace. Freestyle Orchestrator changed my mind entirely. Going to a full API model inside of WS1 Intelligence can be really foundational. The big challenge at this juncture is that you need to build a ton of custom code to help it live to its full potential. One thing I will be looking at is potentially building a custom WS1 Connector to leverage scripts (it’s silly that you can reprocess a product but not process a script).

The potential is huge, but like many offerings in the past (I’m talking about you App Repository) have sounded “great” but did not get the TLC they needed to live up to their potential. I’m cautiously optimistic and I hope that this starts moving faster than it has and people realize how huge it can be for every Windows environment.