How to Notify users of Software Updates?

Outside of using the built in Notification Center tool that Jamf ships (Management Action), I would look at Yo. You can download the Xcode project for Yo, and with a little fiddling and know-how in Xcode, can brand it by adding your own company logo and even renaming it to something else before building the app. Once you do that, and confirm it's working, you can deploy your customized Yo tool to your Macs and then call that with a script in a policy. The nice thing about Yo is that unlike Management Action, the notifications stay on screen until someone clicks a button, a lot like Apple's notifications. You can also have 2 buttons, and have the second one launch Self Service.
With Jamf Pro 10 now you can use direct URLs to open Self Service right to the policy you want it to, rather than just a landing page so that gives you a little additional flexibility.

I scope a policy that opens Self Service once per week to members of any smart group of available SWUs (>0) or other major apps not the latest version (Office, browsers, etc).

You're going to get a lot of replies here so I'll give you my quick one: Either use the built-in patch management system in Jamf 10 -or- roll-out Munki. There are a lot of edge cases you are going to run into by rolling out yourself (as I have). Some of the edge cases you'll have to deal with area:
- blocking apps (can you upgrade/downgrade the app if it's running)
- grace/deferment policies (how long in time or how many pop-ups to notify the user to update before installation is mandatory)
- versioning (do you want to pin specific versions of app? what happens if a user is running a newer version of the app than what you have in the distribution point?)

The list goes on. Use the patch management. Jamf did (almost) all the hard work.

Hi Pete,

I was wondering if you could share how you setup this policy.  I am very interested in learning about this design.

Thank you,
Jeff