In September 2022 we started bundling a notification engine with most App Installers software title to enable end users to be notified that there was a pending software update available if the app was currently running (App Installers would silently update the app if the app was not running). I had previously described these changes in this Jamf Nation post.
During JNUC last year we announced that we would be releasing future updates to this end user notification capability to make it easier for Jamf Pro admins to configure how often these messages appear, the message and a deadline by which the update must be applied (if desired). To prepare for this upcoming capability we have started including the new end user notification engine in the installers being distributed by the App Installers feature.
Most end user notification messages will display with the icon of the application that is running such as this Firefox example.
Unfortunately there are some software titles that we can’t display the application icon in the notification. This has generally resulted in a generic system icon being displayed which can look like a suspicious action is taking place on the end user device.
The titles that will display a generic icon are:
- Bare Bones BBEdit
- DisplayLink Manager
- Facebook Messenger
- GitHub Desktop
- Microsoft Excel 365
- Microsoft OneNote 365
- Microsoft Outlook 365
- Microsoft PowerPoint 365
- Microsoft Remote Desktop 10
- Microsoft Word 365
- TeamViewer 15
- TeamViewer 15 Host
- TeamViewer 15 QuickSupport
- Zoom Client for Meetings
Over the coming weeks, as our new notification engine is included in the installation packages, this notification will now display a message that looks like this.
In the near future you will be able to control the parameters of this notification from within the App Installers interface however in the interim you can continue to manually control the notifications via the instructions provided in this article.
We are still working on improving this process further and I will provide further updates as we get closer to having them in production.
Hi everyone. As I mentioned in the post above, we were making some changes to the way that notification engine behaved to prepare us for an upcoming Jamf Pro release. Unfortunately there was a piece of information that I should have included in this post to help you prepare for this change. The notification engine that is included in all titles that previously were unable to display notifications, has the bundle identifier of com.jamf.appinstallers.notify
If you create and deploy a profile using the instructions contained from this post (omitting step 6)
https://learn.jamf.com/bundle/technical-articles/page/Configuring_End_User_Notifications_for_App_Ins...
using com.jamf.appinstallers.notify as the value for Bundle ID, then the notification engine will be able to display the associated application name for affected applications (e.g. Zoom). This is only a temporary requirement as in the next release of Jamf Pro, App Installers will be able to configure these parameters so these manually created profiles will need to be removed once 10.44 is available.
Without this step, the application name in the notification will display as "notify" and your end users will instead see a dialog such as this one.
Sorry for any confusion caused by the notification behaviour that started appearing this week.
@mdjerome the default notification behaviour of notifying the end user once every 24 hours is the default setting that is inside of the App Installers package. This will present the generic "notify" dialog like the one that I show above and requires a profile to be deployed as described above to properly enable the notification behaviour. You will need to either create and deploy your own config profile to get control over this built in notification behaviour or utilise the automatic profiles option that we provided in 10.44.
Hi, we are running 10.44.1 in the cloud. I am struggling with this notifications since we started to update chrome, edge, firefox, brave, sublime and zoom with jamf mac apps(since multiple months). First we had created the configuration profiles (before 10.44). The last few days I disabled the "old" configprofiles for the apps and enabled the "install supporting configuration profiles in each app and enabled also the notifications. We have the same issue like before 10.44.
Some apps are not showing notifications (only hidden in the notification center)
Some apps not showing an icon
Some apps are showing only
The biggest issue is, that chrome show the notification like it should. When we quit chrome, and it will be updated the next days the notifactions will be shown until the deferral is passing.
Question: When the new feature for the automatic configuration profile is enabled for an app,
is it necessary to enable also the notification in another config profile? in this example for edge.
Hi Folks
once again I :)
So since jamf has pushed the new capability for the automatic config profile and the inbuilt notifications in the mac apps section, it looks to work better with the issue i reported here above.
But we see the next issue with this and i am wondering, if someone has this to.
All new enrolled MacBooks after we had enabled the inbuilt configurations
are not equipped with this configuration profiles and the notifications arent enabled like on the older MacBooks.
checking the MacBooks in the MacApps (deployment) section is shown as deployed. For example here my MacBook, which i enrolled yesterday completely fresh.
Just wrote to jamf support, if here is some bug or may i need to configure something more.
The browsers are not deployed via jamf. Our users are admin on their macbooks, so the install the browsers itself.
The deployment for the macapps is scoped with smartgroups, they check if for example a macbook has installed chrome, when yes, they are in the macapps configuration.
