Does someone know if the VPP IN USE count counts all the machines in the scope or the ones just had the Mac App Store App installed?

We are running Jamf Pro 10.9. Trying to make Microsoft Remote Desktop 10 available through VPP targeting all staff computers (Specific Computers, Specific Users) available in self service.

The behaviour we are seeing is as soon as we add the VPP content into Jamf Pro Mac App Store Apps, all the quantity of the content gets used. So the IN USE is always the same as TOTAL CONENT. As a result, it seems no one can actually install it from Self Service. It simply errors out and take the user to the App Store.

My guess is even though the distribution method is set to Make Available in Self Service, the IN USE actually counts all the machines in the target group, which in our case is well over the app quantity we got from VPP. I know we can just get more VPP licenses for this app coz it is free. Just thought to check here first to confirm if this is expected behaviour. I've looked through Jamf Administration Guide and other posts but couldn't find the relevant information.

Thanks for your help.

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@ccsben I know this doesn't really answer your question how you may want but for what its worth, I dealt with similar issues and just gave up on setting up Microsoft Remote Desktop 10 as a VPP app and built a policy with a script to pull the latest package from Microsoft's CDN directly. Here is the script I used:

!/bin/bash

<<ABOUT_THIS_SCRIPT

Written by:William Smith
Professional Services Engineer
Jamf
bill@talkingmoose.net
https://gist.github.com/talkingmoose/a16ca849416ce5ce89316bacd75fc91a

Originally posted: November 19, 2017
Updated: March 27, 2018
Purpose: Downloads and installs the latest available Microsoft
product specified directly on the client. This avoids having to
manually download and store an up-to-date installer on a
distribution server every month.

Instructions: Update the linkID value to one of the corresponding
Microsoft products in the list and run the script with elevated
privileges. If using Jamf Pro, consider replacing the linkID value
with "$4" and entering the ID as a script parameter in a policy.
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
"You say goodbye and I say exit 0."

ABOUT_THIS_SCRIPT

enter the Microsoft fwlink (permalink) product ID

linkID="868963" # AutoUpdate SKUless download

525133 - Office for Mac SKUless download for Office 365 or 2019

525134 - Word SKUless download

525135 - Excel SKUless download

525136 - PowerPoint SKUless download

525137 - Outlook SKUless download

820886 - OneNote SKUless download

823060 - OneDrive SKUless download

830196 - AutoUpdate SKUless download

800050 - SharePoint Plugin SKUless download

832978 - Skype for Business SKUless download

862280 - InTune Company Portal download

868963 - Remote Desktop

this is the full fwlink URL

url="https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=$linkID"

change directory to /private/tmp to make this the working directory

cd /private/tmp/

download the installer package and name it for the linkID

/usr/bin/curl -JL "$url" -o "$linkID.pkg"

install the package

/usr/sbin/installer -pkg "$linkID.pkg" -target /

remove the installer package when done

/bin/rm -f "$linkID.pkg"

exit 0

My understanding, and I've seen this in practice, is that the IN USE counts all devices assigned, whether they've installed the software or not. This is the same for both macOS and iOS apps.

Thanks, guys. It looks to me like a bug in the Jamf Pro version we use. Not sure if it is still the case in the latest release. If so, I will try to report it through feature requests.

For now, we may have to use the Install Automatically method to actually get the app installed and make that license in use count true.

@amartin253 That could be really handy. We are certainly looking into using App Store to deliver the available Microsoft apps.