Updating Forticlients

[tfatheree]

I'm sure I'm not alone in facing this, but we have difficulty keeping our Forticlient software up to date.  Many of our staff are in the office rarely, so our normal method of deploying software updates isn't suitable for this.  What are others doing in this situation?  I've read up on Forticlient EMS and part of its functionality includes automatic client updates, so that's an option.  Is anyone doing something different?  I'd guess of our overall deployment of about 170 machines with Forticlient, we have 30-40 that are rarely in the office.

[SteveG]

EMS would seem to be your best option but you'd need to expose the EMS server to the web in order for the upgrades to take place, this would also enable the clients to push telemetry information to the server. Alternatively if the remote workers VPN then EMS could push the updates via that connection. Having said that EMS has been a world of pain and suffering for us, but we started with 1.0, currently running 1.2 and it's still buggy, 1.2.1 is due any day. 

[ThunderSpartan]

I have not found it any easier with EMS, you need to setup a task to uninstall with reboot, then run another task to install the updated client. It would be nice to have a client that just gets updated, but this one needs to be replaced every time. ATM it’ more difficult than avg admin. We bought the license for the telemetry with a Fortigate, but it has not been the easiest roll-out. The good thing is I feel the FortiClient is a very good security tool overall, it found infected .php files in an old website backup on my desktop when full AVG and corporate Malwrebytes was installed and never found it. For the cost EMS is worth it. GL IT