Advice on making app deployment faster

[anickless]

So here is my situation, I am in Education with Covid-19 we have been doing our 'Summer Maintenance' early. However, I don't have the extra help I have enjoyed in the past (2 summer students) therefore I have been doing more work getting Computer Carts and Labs re-imaged for September.

I need the communities advice on 2 things:

1) Currently all apps are deployed via self-service (not pushed out)

2) I want to make the installation of apps and settings go more unattended but I do want to keep apps in self-service after the fact.

I am looking for advice as some apps are macOS apps from Apple school manager and others are packages.

I was thinking about switching the apps I wanted installed to 'install automatically', But I also have the situation wherein I don't want every computer that is part of that scope to install it (teachers don't need this app but students do) and then maybe afterwards switching it to "install via self-service"

not sure but I would like to hear from the community for advice.

[sdagley]

@anickless It sounds like you're going to re-image the Macs and then re-enroll them in your Jamf Pro instance. I'd highly recommend using the combination of DEPNotify and DEPNotify-Starter to install your initial configuration. Despite the name, you do not need to be using DEP, or Automated Device Enrollment as it's now known, to make use of DEPNotify. It does give you a head start if you plan to switch to DEP/ADE in the future though.

[anickless]

the question i have is if I go with DEPNotify and will I have to change my policies to 'Install automatically' or does the scripts call the packages I want installed regardless of the deployment method?

[sdagley]

@anickless For the DEPNotify process you should have policies scoped to all computers but only triggered by a Custom Event trigger (e.g. for Acrobat Reader I have a policy with the Custom Event trigger AcrobatReader) which the script running DEPNotify can use to initiate install.

These would be separate from your Self Service install policies (if you wanted the user to be able to manually re-install if something was removed/updated. You could separate the package install portion of those policies and use the custom trigger policies to do the actual install by using a Files and Processes payload to execute the command jamf policy -trigger AppName

[anickless]

So how do you handle VPP apps? set them to automatically install?

[sdagley]

@anickless All of my VPP apps have used Self Service install, but I'd hope auto install would work