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## Understanding Deployment Plans

A deployment plan allows you to set the order in which Control Manager updates your groups of managed products. With Control Manager, you can implement multiple deployment plans to different managed products at different schedules. For example, during an outbreak involving an email-borne virus, you can prioritize the update of your email message scanning software components such as the latest virus pattern file for Trend Micro ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange.
The Control Manager installation creates two deployment plans:

- Deploy to All Managed Products Now (Default): default plan used during component updates
- Deploy to All Immediately (Outbreak-Prevention): default plan for the Outbreak Prevention Services Prevention Stage

By default, these plans deploy updates to all products in the Product Directory immediately.
Select or create plans from the Manual and Scheduled download screens. Customize these plans, or create new ones, as required by your network. For example, create deployment plans according to the nature of the outbreak:

- Email-borne virus
- File-sharing virus

Deploying updates to the Product Directory is separate from the download process.
Control Manager downloads the components and follows the deployment plan according to manual or scheduled download settings.
When creating or implementing a deployment plan, consider the following points:

- Assign deployment schedules to folders, not to specific products.
  Planning the contents of the Product Directory folders, therefore, becomes very important.
- You can only include one folder for each deployment plan schedule.
  However, you can specify more than one schedule per deployment plan.
- Control Manager bases the deployment plan delays on the completion time of the download, and these delays are independent of each other.
  For example, if you have three folders to update at 5 minute intervals, you can assign the first folder a delay of 5 minutes, and then set delays of 10 and 15 minutes for the two remaining folders.