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Please forgive me if this is really simple, i can't seem to figure this out.

Here's the situation:

I need to handle the patching of Apple Software Updates on the Macs that I manage, but there are some Macs that need to be manually patched because of software that runs on them. Sometimes the Apple updates break the software that is running on these machines. These are Macs that are running scientific and computational software, such as MatLab, and from what I know about MatLab, it's very finicky with regards to software updates.

I have a Smart Group created that will have Macs that have more than 1 software update available and no firmware updates available that I want to run the policy on.

The problem is, those Macs that can't be automatically patched show up in the Smart Group I created because they have updates available.

How can I exclude those Macs that cannot be updated from the Smart Group?

Creating separate groups for each will take too long because I would have to create Static Groups and there are just too many Macs to add manually to each group.

Thanks in advance.

Why not just add additional criteria in your Smart Group for Software Updates that excludes Macs with those specialized applications installed on them?

For example, add "Application Title" | Does not have | "MatLab" in addition to the "Number of Available Software Updates | more than 1" and whatever else you normally add to it. Have you tried that?

If that works you should be able to add additional application titles in there as well.

hmmm, I didn't think about that. thanks for the idea. i may try that.

also, after I posted this, I realized those computers that can't be patched automatically are mostly on a certain network segment, so i created a few and allowed the policy to run on specific ones. i hope it works.

however, being able to nest groups would be a feature that would make things so much simpler and easier.

Yes, nesting groups is something that is "coming" in Casper Suite 9 (public information) so you'll be able to do that someday soon.
in the meantime, on a Feature Request thread I had posted a method for pulling Casper Suite group information per Mac into an Extension Attribute. I don't know if that would help you at all in this case though. I actually think you'd be better off with your Network Segments and carefully set up Smart Groups.

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