Hey everyone, I need a sanity check on our onboarding process.
Right now, when we hire a remote employee, we buy a Dell laptop, ship it to our HQ, I manually unbox it, image it, enroll it in Hexnode, box it backs up, and ship it to the user.
It’s expensive and adds like 5 days to the process. Is there a way to ship these directly to the user but still have them land in Hexnode automatically?
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You definitely need to look into Hexnode’s Zero-Touch Drop Ship Provisioning. We were doing the exact same “double shipping” dance until we switched to this earlier this year.
Basically, you can have Dell (or Lenovo/HP) ship the device straight to the employee’s house. When they open it and connect to a network, the Hexnode agent installs itself automatically before they even get to the desktop. We haven’t physically touched a new laptop in months.
That sounds exactly like what I need. But how does the vendor know which Hexnode account to enroll in? Do I have to give Dell my MDM credentials? That seems risky.
No credentials are needed! That’s the cool part about how Hexnode does it.
You go into your portal and generate a Provisioning Package (.ppkg). It’s just a file that contains the Hexnode installer and a bulk enrollment token hidden inside. You send that single file to your Dell rep and ask them to do a “static file injection” at the factory. They just drop that file onto the devices during the shipping process. They don’t need access to your console at all.
Okay, I like the sound of that. So, from the user’s perspective, what happens? Do they have to run the file?
Nope, the user doesn’t do anything different. Because the .ppkg file is sitting in a specific Windows system folder (thanks to the factory injection), the OS detects it the moment the device powers on for the first time. After connecting to a network, it silently installs the Hexnode agent in the background.
By the time they hit the desktop, the device is already managed, and your apps start installing. It’s a huge time saver.
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