Am I the only person that has 8 open cases with jamf support?

[thejenbot]

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Things that used to work don't work anymore. Things that should work don't, (and let's be honest - some of them never have). There are weird commands going through, or failing, or pending. My logs look like garbage.

We transitioned to cloud hosted so that we could help alleviate some of the workload, and to be fair I'm sure I'd be much more hands-on with these cases if we were still on-prem...but so much time and effort is going into this that everything else is suffering. I haven't had time to come on jamf nation and throw questions out to see if anyone else is dealing with any of the random crap I am, and now it's all snowballed into such a mess that I need to vent and kindly ask for a show of hands.

I sincerely hope that nobody else finds themselves in a similar situation, but if you do - hi! You're not alone! If this is ringing a bell for anyone, please let me know. Or, if you've gone through something like this in the past, please let me know (and hopefully tell me that it will get better).

That's all. Thanks, and have a great day! :)

[snook]

We see exactly the same thing with our UNC Wide cloud instance.

Its a game of let's see what will fail for no apparent reason today. Its maddening some days to unravel the whys and whats of the issues.

I hope to get together some like minded folks next week at JNUC and see if we can collectively get things improved with JAMF

Snook

[er1ca2000]

I get frustrated when the tech people don't listen to me when I am telling them what's wrong. I wish I could go next week. I have list of things to change.

[kh384]

We are seeing the same issues.

[Stephen_Perry]

Me, when calling Jamf Support:

[gachowski]

I don't think I have had 8 total tickets opened, if you exclude beta program and upgrade my server tickets the whole 10 years I have been using Jamf products. Don't get me wrong, Jamf isn't perfect. I have had more than 8 issues, it just that support has helped me resolve the issue every time or provided a work around...many times the work around was better than my original way of doing what I was trying to do.

C

PS I have a ticket open now for a issue that support found when we troubleshooting an issue I created, and that issue doesn't even effect us. That is a super star support team and organization. It's the only open ticket that I can remember for our cloud hosted instance in about 3 years.

PSS... While I am 100% sure there are many issues with Jamf Pro, I am wondering if we are not all a little spoiled? In comparison to other software I have to interact with Jamf Pro has the least issues by far... we have left other MDM vendors and don't get me started with Apple......it's clear by any measure Jamf Pro is better software than the past few current versions of the macOS.

This post plus this other post has kinda got me a little worried and thinking about how we all view Jamf. While I am sort of ok with with people posting negative stuff on specific issues, I am sure that it's not good for everyone if we just generally post negatively. We have to all remember that this day and age if you say somthing enough times poeple take it to be a fact.

I also understand that the work we do it's very easy to "vent" without thinking about the all the consequences, my team would be rich if they got paid by the number times I blurt out I am going to email Tim Cook.

end soapbox

[snook]

I have been a JAMF user since version 4 (yes Composer for ARD 4 way in 2006) Zach H. was my SE, Wudi did our jumpstart. I love JAMF and still do, I want to see them succeed. I have been carrying the banner for many years.

But the QA and issues we are seeing lately have been the worst in years. Granted we have over 18K clients and I'd argue more policies and smart groups than most instances. We are one cloud instances with many sites for the entire UNC system. And we are very big on bug reporting and making this product better through client/vendor collaboration so our ticket count might be elevated due to that. And I will say our support has always been good from a customer service POV but we have run into a lot of "never seen that issue before" problems lately.

Here is just a sample of the issues on our last 30 day report:

Product Issues Associated to Appalachian State University

PI-006187 Jamf Remote - MBS Xojo Plugins fail on 10.6.2
PI-002379 macOS User Level MDM Commands may be queued after user logs out
PI-005569 Jamf.apps timing out after upgrading to 10.2.x when sites are involved with larger sets of computers/computer groups
PI-005048 Apps - App Updates - Automatic Update Sends all Updates at Once - Can Cause JPS Crashes
PI-005315 (PI-005315) Slow SQL Query on patches.html Causes Page Load to Slow or Fail
PI-003299 Icons - Duplicate images stored in Database
PI-004990 (PI-004990) Patch Management - Version Numbers Not in Order
PI-005007 Multiple New Patch Policy Objects write with latest Opened Temporary Objects Definition Parent
PI-004686 (PI-004686) Results added to scope target view via a filtered search have blank 'Add' buttons
PI-004505 Policy Logs for deleted Policies move to Remote Logs
PI-000524 Can't reset management password if the password stored in the JSS is wrong
PI-003969 (PI-003969) Modifying Users and Groups > LDAP Group Name Breaks Connection
PI-002998 Patch reporting causes threads and connections to max out, especially in large environments
PI-000857 (PI-000857) Configuration profiles may install outside of site scope
PI-005548 JCDS File Uploads Can Get Stuck in "Availability Pending", Eventually "Upload Failed"
PI-004101 Casper Admin may fail to upload and replicate large packages to JCDS or Cloud Distribution points
PI-002379 macOS User Level MDM Commands may be queued after user logs out
PI-005048 Apps - App Updates - Automatic Update Sends all Updates at Once - Can Cause JPS Crashes
PI-003515 If a policy doesn't complete gracefully, future occurrences of the policy will not be advertised to the client upon check-in within an hour
PI-004473 (PI-004473) DEP enrollment - Prestage Enrollments | Accounts Payload: Skip Account Creation is not respected.
PI-002765 Device records not fully deleted if device checks in while being deleted.
PI-002269 Policies intermittently fail to be triggered by Loginhook
PI-002745 (PI-002745) ASM - Shared iPad - Configuration Profiles - Web Clips Payload - Web Clips Fail when Deployed to Shared iPads at the Device Level
PI-006109 Macs with T2 chip reporting as "FileVault Enabled" out of box.

[bvrooman]

I share a similar concern, having seen Jamf's support offering change over the years. I understand that they're growing as a company and need to standardize how they handle support cases, but I find that it is now rarely productive to contact support except to find out which PI we need to look for in future patch notes.

It is doubly frustrating when I see what kind of support we get elsewhere. We had an issue with some certificates on our CrashPlan servers (which ended up being a problem with how Venafi built the JKS, so nothing even caused by their product), and their engineer still spent 2 hours on the phone with me troubleshooting.
By comparison, my last experience with Jamf support was an engineer who scheduled a troubleshooting session more than a week away, didn't show up to it, and then closed the case with a note that my workaround was good enough as a fix.

[diradmin]

To all contributing and/or in agreement with this thread, the question is now how do we make our voices heard by Jamf?

I've reached out to my CSS on multiple occasions, and in each instance they seem to feel the same level of frustration as myself. In one instance, they actually lashed out at me (the customer) for pointing out the multiple issues we encountered during a major upgrade and went so far as to state that it was my fault as we did not opt in for their "premium" support.

I'm reluctant to bring anything further to their attention, and am in the same situation as @bvrooman , as escalating to Jamf Support has now become more of a formality and for the purpose of identifying a PI, with little to no expectation as to the actual resolution of the issue at hand.

[bvrooman]

I've had a few conversations with the account rep who covers the region our parent company is in (unfortunately I don't believe I've even met the person who covers our actual region), and the recommendation has been the same every time: pay for premium support and things might be better.

[lehmanp00]

A few weeks ago we had a JAMF support call for multiple issues with our JSS system. All of them turned out to be existing PIs that have not been fixed yet. JAMF said that our 'next, best thing' we can do is load balance our whole setup. However, they don't provide much help for that and all the issues were PI anyways. Very frustrating.

[rframe]

@snook if you get anywhere with PI-006109 id be grateful of an update - im getting frustrated with this problem and need to get it logged with JAMF support myself, have had a discussion on here with people about it so hopefully enough people have mentioned it that they are fixing it

[ega]

So @snook and I are on the same instance and we DO pay for premium support. The issue is not with Support but instead with product Quality Assurance. Recent releases have been "death by 10,000 paper cuts". Witness the quick release of x.1's over the 10.x series. Yes this is still the best macOS management tool available but we want to make it much better.

[thejenbot]

The reason I have so many cases open is that I, too, want to make the product better - and just by creating this discussion I did make my voice heard. I got an email from my CSS and he literally typed out "no, you're not the only person that has 8 support cases open". He called and we had a good chat and now have a plan to get over this hurdle.

It is overwhelming at times but overall I don't think things would be any better elsewhere. At least here we have this great community that can feel free to post - and feel free to get on a soapbox and disagree with the way that I went about this. If we weren't in the middle of a massive warranty issue with our iPads I would have more time to get on here and create individual threads for all of the issues to see if others are experiencing the same thing, but this is the best I can do for the time being.

As @snook says we constantly hear "I've never seen that before" - not just from jamf and Apple, but from other vendors as well - frankly we're getting sick of it. Why we're so lucky I'll never know.

I will be at JNUC this year for the first time (probably rocking my favorite green ninja turtles sweatshirt if you want to say hi!) and am really looking forward to talking with people to see what I can do better and how we can work together to improve as a whole. I really appreciate the comments from everyone - at the very least it's good to know I'm not alone! :)

[snook]

@thejenbot email me snookkd at appstate dot edu (and anyone else planning to go to JNUC). Lets plan a meet up to talk about all our PIs and moving forward with JAMF support. I'm not cool enough to rock the TMNT hoodie but if you ask enough people, "Have you seen Snook?" you'll find me easy enough

[scottb]

What is tough here is that we have an internal push to go to AirWatch, and I'm fighting for the life of Jamf as our offering.
When I have basic things like enrollment URL/QuickAdd not working as needed, and others that have gone on for far too long, I will get asked why am I still insisting on Jamf?

I think people are venting after a lonnnnng time here, not just a guy/gal who has their first issue ranting about how much Jamf sucks.
It's a sign that Jamf needs to read about and act. Growing pains are normal, and we all know that if tech worked as well as it's sold to, half of us would be out of work. I just want the tools I use to work and that issues don't drag through version after version, leaving me dry.

Still love Jamf, but I see the need to tighten things up as well. Like many others, I don't get any budget for JNUC or the like :(

[millersc]

Funny, I have an open ticket waiting on a response I literally had to put in the ticket... "Is anyone monitoring this ticket?" to try and get someones attention. Still waiting.....

[nigelmarrion]

I agree with almost all the comments that have been posted in this thread so far. We are challenged by a lingering number of defects that never seem to get fixed plus almost every new release seems to introduce more defects that affect us (a single private High School with about 2000 devices) than are resolved.

A few months ago I initiated some discussion with JAMF support leadership and expressed my concern that 2018 was looking like 2013-14 was. That is JAMF product quality was becoming an issue as the company was continuing to grow quickly and add more functionality.

FYI we jumped from JAMF to AirWatch in 2014 in frustration about the product defects at that time. It proved to be a big mistake for us!

I would like to call for a freeze on adding new functionality and a focus on product quality for Jamf Pro for a while please.

[cbrewer]

I hate to jump on this bandwagon as I know that writing software in general is a difficult task - especially something as complex as Jamf Pro. That said, version 10 hasn't been a good experience so far. Every dot release has been a trade off of resolving an issue or 2 and then dealing with 2 or 3 new ones. We've been with Jamf since version 5 I believe. I think they had about 30 employees when we first chose Casper over LanRev. @nick helped get us going. While it's still an extremely valuable tool for us, the high number of product issues requires constant attention and troubleshooting. We recently spent the better part of a week dealing with a major issue that ultimately was out of our hands. It was a new PI introduced in 10.7. Without a seasoned Jamf admin and Jamf's excellent (usually) support, it would be difficult to be successful with their product IMHO.

[joelande]

Our district has been with JAMF/Casper for more than 10 years, and this post really resonated with me. When we started using JAMF, it was by far the best product our district had ever purchased, and the support we received from JAMF was second to none.

For the past few years, I feel we have spent more time troubleshooting JAMF than JAMF has saved us managing devices.

Lately we have been experiencing a host of issues. Policies just not triggering for any apparent reason, performance issues, software update issues, user-level-mdm issues, just heaps and heaps of seemingly inexplicable behaviors. @ega put it well — “death by 10,000 … cuts”.

This summer I moved from on-prem to cloud hosted after several discussion with JAMF engineers reassuring me that performance would not be an issue. We even started over from scratch with a clean install to avoid bring over years of cruft. Guess what? Performance has been an issue. A serious issue. (I keep getting the This Service is Temporarily Unavailable time-out when performing mass actions, and the UI is sporadically slow). My last Support Ticket was resolved by: “Your workaround will be to do mass actions in smaller batches.” By the way, by smaller batches, JAMF means less than 150 devices. Isn't this an MDM? Isn't it built to do mass actions? If I wanted to do small batches of devices at a time, and constantly monitor the states of the commands I send, and then resend the commands for the devices that fail, I could use Apple Remote Desktop and Configurator.

Just this week (its only Wednesday morning), we have encountered:
trying to install iWork updates, computers are getting the command "Install App - Pages" (or Numbers, or Keynote) but nothing actually happens
performance issues with JAMF Cloud instance that require me to limit actions to no more than 150 devices at a time

In general, support is not as good as it has been (ever since they removed the dedicated, account-assigned support staff really), I could go on about that, but the fundamental issue here has just been product reliability. I have had to create a Google Spreadsheet shared with the department that tracks PI's.

Lately JAMF just doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. Period.

PS - and it is getting really frustrating, and I hate that, because re-read my first sentence.

[mm2270]

I can sadly chime in and corroborate the issues being discussed here. While I don't use support much, the last couple of times I have used it, it's been very lackluster and disappointing. I won't mention any specific issues or names, but I had contacted support several months back about a problem that was perplexing me, something that wasn't working anymore, which I know for a fact used to work in a previous release. When I initially spoke to the support person, they weren't even aware that the product was supposed to do this specific function. I had to give them a detailed description of how it was supposed to work and they came back and said, I was right and they were mistaken. Not very promising so far. Then the support call I had to troubleshoot the issue turned into essentially one big shoulder shrug. They had no idea why it wasn't working, didn't offer to do anything but the most rudimentary troubleshooting on their end, and in the end could only suggest I use a workaround - one that I came up with myself and mentioned and not an actual suggestion from them.
I almost felt like I was supporting them instead of them supporting me. I wish I could say it was the only experience where I felt like that, but it's not. It seems like support and knowledge of the product and how to actually fix stuff, at least with the general support techs, has taken a real nose dive in the last couple of years. I'm certain there are still some very sharp folks at Jamf, but I'm really wondering if they have much influence these days in the direction of the product or how support functions. It sure doesn't seem like it.

I still love Jamf, and their product is still great in many respects, but at the rate things are going, I find myself having trouble enthusiastically recommending them to people I encounter in my job. There are competing products, some that are decent and some not. But eventually Jamf will get booted from the top spot in this management space unless they take control of the situation and get these PIs and support issues straightened out. I hope someone there is paying attention.

[diradmin]

It would be great to have a Jamf chime in here at some point to perhaps provide some insight and reassurance.

[PeterG]

For the past few years, I feel we have spent more time troubleshooting JAMF than JAMF has saved us managing devices.

Yes. jamf needs to step up their QA quite a bit.

[obi-k]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but sounds like the landslide of issues happened with version 10 and up?

We are still on JSS 9.101.4-t1507816971. I'm holding my breath, but eventually, we'll have to jump to JSS 10.

[lehmanp00]

@mvu

IMHO, somewhat.

I think a bigger issue is the overall architecture of has issues too. Performance, even when everything seems to be working, can be very slow. Not sure if it is just Tomcat or the fact that this is a Java app.

I also wanted to point something else out as well,

We have talked to other MDMs who have called Apple's MDM "Cloud" the "Triangle of Death": MDM>client Device>Apple Cloud. I wonder how much performance and PIs issues originate with Apple.

[mm2270]

@mvu Version 9.x has it's own share of issues, but from what I can tell, v10 has had more of them, and more frequently it seems. I'm still on 9.99, but like you, the org has to move to v10 since we can't move ahead with full support for High Sierra, and certainly no support for Mojave unless we do that. I'm dreading moving to version 10, since I haven't seen it overall as a good thing. My experience with it has been that the UI is very sluggish and continues to be that way, even with a relatively mature 10.7x. But I think you have a point that the quality has gone down since 10 was released.

[CGundersen]

We just made the jump to 10.7.1 from 9.101.x last week ... still feeling things out and finding a few head scratchers. Glad to hear other folks still lagging as feel less shame now ;) Needed support for iOS 12 and Mojave (we skipped HiC) ... and macOS VPP device channel support. We aren't crashing, so that's a plus. Made the jump to InnoDB (and clustering) years ago w/ assistance of Jamf support (good peeps!). Performance differences post 10.7.1 upgrade seem negligible so far ... but clicking on "Management" tab of given iOS device is pretty rough (I've seen it take up to 30 seconds to respond). We have around 16,000 Macs and 8,000 iOS. 3,000 freaking apps in mobile catalog ... ugh.

Jamf QA needs to improve and I do feel for the support folks these days.

*I'll add that we've had our share of internal issues (can you say network scream test?) and Jamf support have been helpful in troubleshooting some of that as well.

[hodgesji]

I'm with @snook and @ega on this.... the question we keep asking internally after every update: "Which features and apps that we are paying for can't we use with this update?"

[sam]

We typically let conversations on Jamf Nation be organic discussions, but we do see and follow the threads. And although we try not to interrupt the community conversation, I wanted take the opportunity to chime in on this one. Plus, you asked us to :)

We hear you. We are here for you. It is essential that we at Jamf provide the best possible product to you, our customers. Our product isn’t just the software, but it also includes our technical support, professional services, training, integrations with our partners in the ecosystem, as well as the vibrant and unparalleled community that exists here on Jamf Nation. If we are falling short in any of those categories, we need to improve. We need to improve to not only meet your need, but exceed it. This is our responsibility and we do not take it lightly. We hear what you are saying and we will do something about it.

To start, we are reaching out to all those who are posting on this thread to ensure we fully understand the individual issues that you are experiencing with our product and processes and doing everything in our power to correct them. Additionally, we are aggregating all this data in a consolidated location to discuss any systemic issues that exist so that we can fix them. This is happening with cross departmental efforts and with strong representation from our support and services, as well as our product team. We will also be reaching out to @snook to make sure that we have the right people in the room to listen and talk during the session he is organizing at the JNUC.

On a personal note, it isn’t always easy to read negative things about the teams that you work hard with every day. Especially when they all truly have your best interests at heart. Despite that, I really appreciate this topic coming to light. It helps us get better. “Relentless self improvement” is a core value at Jamf, and this is helping direct us to a key area to get better.

If you have anything that you feel applies but do not wish to post to this thread, please email your customer success representative at success@jamf.com or directly to me at sam.johnson [at] jamf.com.

[snook]

@sam Thank you for the response, I definitely share your sentiment that we have everyone's best interests at heart. We are as much partners as we are customers with JAMF, our personal success at our own jobs is directly tied to JAMF's success as well. And I have personally raised a glass or 2 of adult beverages with dozens of JAMFers in many cities and to the person I have enjoyed their company and they are great people and many are personal friends. In case it got lost in the threads, if anyone is at JNUC next week and wants to join the conversation, email me at snookkd [at] appstate.edu and I will share my contact info. Or hit me up in the JNUC app. We will find an area (at the bar?) and share ideas on how to improve things. There is a formal JAMF meeting being scheduled as well. We can take these ideas directly to the proper teams. Or just look for this ugly mug and yell SNOOOOOK!

[scottb]

@sam - thanks for chiming in. This is the reason I did:

On a personal note, it isn’t always easy to read negative things about the teams that you work hard with every day. Especially when they all truly have your best interests at heart.

This is how I feel at work when I try to offer the client(s) a service and in spite of not being the smartest admin here, I know enough to do most of what I need and I learn that which I don't. But when I let a client down, it hurts. Teammates say "don't take it personally" but that's not possible if you care about your work - and I bet everyone in this thread does - a lot!

Let's hope we can all work towards a more solid offering.

[dgreening]

I'm not going to go off (again) about our experiences with PIs, but I did want to mention one thing that has really helped us (~29k managed Macs), and its great to see Jamf FINALLY bringing official, documented, support for: InnoDB. Let me say that again. INNODB! Since converting over from MyISAM to InnoDB (with Jamf's help), the overall performance of the environment is literally night and day. Yes, I still have several PIs open, and STILL have to clean cruft out of the DB manually on a semi-routine basis, but I can't remember to last time I maxed out my DB connections for my load balanced client-facing nodes. Table lock is the DEVIL! I refused to move to Jamf 10 until we completed the conversion. The sooner Jamf can help you on-prem hosted folks to make the conversion, the happier everyone will be.

[rframe]

just in relation to everyone's experience of support - im really pleased with Jamf support, i commented here after having started a thread and not being aware of the PI for my issue and a member of the customer relations team has noted it and opened me a support case and ive already heard back from support explaining my issue is addressed in 10.8 and providing how we could work round in the mean time. - i have to say thats pretty excellent for me, i know not everyone's been so lucky.

[RLR]

Similar experience. We recently moved to a cloud instance and I seem to constantly open ticket with Jamf now. Got about 5 open at the moment. Been using Jamf for 5/6 years and it's only in the last year or two that I've been having to open tickets. Everything seems to come down to a known "product issue". Sometimes a tomcat restart is all that is needed but I can't do that anymore as it's cloud based.

[jmjenki3]

I've been seeing much the same experience as others. I've helped to identify a few product issues myself, and it seems a lot of what we've been seeing performance-wise, has been since we've moved to cloud hosting. Despite our testing, we all too often find ourselves surprised by a new issue with each update.

Just this past week, we had our JCDS apparently disconnect since Monday, and we didn't hear anything back for over 24 hours. I recognize you folks at Jamf are getting ready for the big show next week, but we do have to keep the lights on. When I'm asked about the status of our management suite, and all I can offer is a shrug, that does not inspire confidence.

If there is any discussion to be had at JNUC next week, I would very much like to be involved to share my thoughts.

[MrP]

I just avoid creating cases unless it is an absolute must. When I find bugs I don't submit them anymore via cases because we pay jamf, not vs versa. When they pay me to improve their product I might consider dealing with the headache of their tech support who don't understand most problems and don't read what you have written, replying asking about things you have already told them. I've finished bug report cases with "This is just a bug report. I don't want to have any further involvement in this issue. Do with it what you want", to have them request to do a webex to see 'whats wrong with my system'. And this isn't on complex problems. It has been something as clear as "When you check this box in the configuration profile, it does the opposite as what it says, and vs versa". Tech support will attempt to waste hours of my time with emails and webexs about it when all I wanted to do was to submit a bug report and not be bothered anymore.

Point is, the people who are paid to listen and help rarely do either very well, so I just don't bother reporting issues to JAMF anymore unless it's a show stopping issue.

[mottertektura]

I'm not trying to pile on... But I stumbled across this thread while searching to see if others were hitting the same PI that I am with Patch Management (which has rendered it completely unusable). And it is reassuring to know now that I'm not the only one that is feeling overwhelmed with the current state of affairs. I've had an unusually large amount of cases open this year, with many of the same outcomes listed here. I sincerely hope we see some change soon. I would be interested if there's a meet up planned for next week as well to also share my frustrations and help work towards a resolution.

[LRZ_Jamf]

Hi,

the most frustrating stuff for us is currently:
There are tons of PI's which aren't listed in the Known Issues lists. And having those Issues in the List doesn't even make sure JAMF seems to care about them.

How about making all those PIs publicly available in the Known Issues list (maybe with more then one sentence describing it) + a link to short workaround description (if available). This would reduce your ticket mess (the last ~10 tickets I opened were like "Ah we know that, there's a PI and a workaround here.." ... after mailing around 10 times with "have your tried this and that") as people can look at the list and find their potential issues themselves, we are all IT-Technicians.

The worst ticket I ever had was the one about Login Items and Automounting Network shares with 10.13.. I was given a script which worked in 10.8.x and doesn't work since 10.11 anymore. After that I scripted around that mess, told my support-ticket-owner to document my solution as it would help lots of other guys aswell. Nothing happend.

The second worst ticket(s) were about PreStage Imaging which turned out to be a total mess after jamfPro 10.(?).
You can't add directory bindings, you can't add configurations (or smart configurations). So you are back to add a few packages and do the everything else using policies(hell, this broke 20+ Sites in our Setup, this was a hell of a clicking mess in a SLOW GUI). Nothing documented, no public PI. Thanks JAMF. I wouldn't have upgraded if I knew this earlier, I would have fixed stuff before.

Now, new bug, which is known in slack but not really documented:
If you add a Smart Group which references another (non existant) Computer Group using the Classic API jamfPro carries out the order.
But now every SelfService isn't working anymore. -> Find the Computer Group using the queries mentioned on https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/articles/552/on-prem-jamf-pro-customers-upgrading-to-10-7 and fix the autopkg recipe which makes the mess.
Hell why is there a 10.7.1 if the API lets me produce f*cked SmartGroups again?
Yeah didn't make a ticket yet, because the answer will be "Yeah, there is PI-xxxxxx, ticket closed". (-> See Paragraph 2 of my rant)

I hope everything gets better with JAMF in the near future, else we gotta find another product which doesn't have minefield of bugs everywehere.

Cheers,
@bofh

[thejenbot]

@MrP you make some good points. I have spent hours upon hours of my time troubleshooting issues, at the cost of many other things not getting done. It's just me and my boss, we're in charge of only ~1350 iPads + all the other technology necessary to teach the K-12 students in our smaller district. I can't even imagine what it would be like if we were larger, as I know that many people now involved in this discussion are. I feel for support, as someone mentioned above, but I feel for us more.

The latest thing that really makes steam come out of my ears is a PI that makes apps show as having been removed from the App Store, and it therefore turns them into a brick in your app catalog, and removes them from Self Service. I blindly believed the system earlier this year, and a teacher believed me, and so we spent money to replace an app that we'd already paid for, that is in fact still available in the GD App Store. I told support they could send me a check to cover the classroom budget dollars that we wasted due to this issue and it was brushed off, but I was not kidding. It may seem like a small amount to such a large company, but to a teacher that spends money from her own pocket because budgets keep getting slashed, it is huge. I'm just tired of this.

Anyone interested in chatting can reach out to me at JNUC - I'll have either my vintage TMNT sweatshirt or t-shirt on, so just look for bright green :)

[cgolebio]

I was just reading everything and I felt compelled to interject. We have a great and supportive relationship with JAMF and overall happy. That said, I am not saying anyone has, but when you look at it, has the company lost its way from the basics? With all the fluff and pretty graphics, does the product still achieve the basics and do it well? Would my job be unpleasant without it?

My opinion is that as long as the basics are still running strong, everything else is icing as they say. I think it is up to each of us to define what those basics are as they might be different.

For me, it’s providing management capabilities over Macs similar to what SCCM and AD can do for Windows—providing a greater level of confidence that patches and other items are installed and corporate policies are maintained. Has JAMF done well? Yes and no. Yes because they provide a mechanism to get it done and it’s getting done; no because of certain issues within the GUI that haven’t been fixed yet. But my point is the basics are still met because I have a way of getting it done.

If I was to critique, I think JAMF and JAMF support needs to just understand, keep the basics working and bring value added changes to the product that simplify the typical workflows and workarounds we employ. And while there might not be a lot of upvotes on some feature requests (honestly the feature requests appear to get lost in shuffle) and not everyone is impacted by a PI, it’s the little and simple things that matter and can make the big meaningful difference.

Have a happy JNUC, everyone!