There is no way around this, other than a Restricted Software record. 90 days is the maximum allowed.

That makes me a sad panda! I figured that was the case, but I was hoping for some out-of-the-box solution LOL Thank you!!

You can also look into this https://github.com/Theile/montereyblocker , but on machines that are running Big Sur, there isn't a way to hide it anymore. On Catalina and lower, you can still theoretically use the softwareupdate --ignore command to hide the update.

Yeah Catalina is still holding strong with the ""softwareupdate --ignore" command. We're going to send out a site-wide email asking people not to put themselves through the misery of the hour long download LOL

@elsmith To add some specificity to @jtrant 's response, the process name you want to use a Restricted Software record for is "InstallAssistant" (quotes not needed) so that a user can't bypass the restriction by renaming the Install macOS Monterey app.

Unfortunately, that will also block the Big Sur upgrade, which we cannot do 😀

@elsmith I have to ask, why would you not have users install macOS Monterey instead of macOS Big Sur at this point? My personal opinion is Big Sur was a year long Alpha release of Monterey, and for my org we were so delayed receiving qualified versions of some of the "Security" tools required that it never became a recommend upgrade, and was only supported on Macs that required it (e.g. M1 system). Fortunately that wasn't the case with Monterey support, and it is already our recommended version of macOS.

Because I work at a National Laboratory and we have a much longer approval process than "normal folks" and it's not approved for us yet. If I'd had my way, I would have completely skipped Big Sur approval, but that, too, was not an option for us.

My sympathies. 

LOL Thanks! 🤣

We are almost there... *sigh* just not quite...