App Request in Jamf Pro 10.14

[blackholemac]

The functionality looks great, and I'm ready to put it into immediate use save for one big detail that I find myself wondering "why?" from Jamf on.

Why can't I use a smart user group for my requesters in addition to a static group? I would like to enable all staff to request and enable say 2-3 people to approve.

[jphillips]

My biggest "aw man that sucks" moment was when I saw that it isn't site based. We have 160 schools with a tech at each one that handles the school's devices and app distribution. Would have been great for them to be able to set up their specific school with their own requestors/approvers.

[blackholemac]

Its definitely a good start and more intuitive than say than the email requests that we currently use. To help Jamf out on a sample workflow for this (for us anyway), here is our workflow:

1. Teacher discovers or is informed of whichever great app from some source. App could be paid or free at this point. (sometimes our teachers buy one copy personally to try out)

2. Teacher tells the Tech lead at their building that they want it (or informally, many of them know our curriculum integration group and ask the point person directly).

3. Tech lead (or point person for curriculum) determines the following: App Name, vendor, category, paid or free, and finally the target devices.

4. The point person approves or denies the request for the app (usually the only denials come on curriculum or funding issues) as we try to be accommodating. The point person also determines the funding source for paid apps (which VPP account do we take it out of?)

5. Said approval is then transmitted to myself (and my backup) as we only want one person handling apps and scoping in Jamf Pro.

Now that I have done the workflow and seen how this feature could work with our environment, I request the following:

1. If Jamf can allow a smart group for requesters, I would turn that capability over to the entire staff of LSC that uses iOS devices. I can do that with a simple smart group.

2. Ideally we want to send the approval request to the tech lead at a given building and the curriculum point person.

Including the tech lead at the building will filter out the useless requests...I can see people not including what people need to decide, but more importantly, I can see someone trying to file a tech help ticket by using that....we don't want that. The tech lead would also know if the user simply didn't search Self Service for it to start with. I don't want to see the tech leads at the building though getting inundated with requests from other buildings. This dovetails with @jphillips request for either Sites or in my case buildings maybe being the source. I would include our curriculum point person on all requests though so she already has all the data and can mark "approved or rejected". If approved, the original requester would be told that all apps are added within 24-48 hours and to check Self Service.

1. Our curriculum point person then transmits me our standard agreed upon email and I add the app or do nothing whichever is relevant.