Best Practice for Deploying App Store Apps in Computer Lab

[zskidmor]

Hey all:
I find smatterings in different discussions about this but I thought it would be nice to have a clean thread about this.

With the Apple VPP for education, it is easy to assign apps to users but it doesn't appear to be support for assigning apps to shared desktops in a computer lab environment.

What is the best practice for this? Download the app and package it and just push it out? and do that for each time there is an app store app update? That seems to be a rather cumbersome way of doing it.

[donmontalvo]

Unless I'm missing something, once apps purchases/assigned through VPP are installed on a Mac owned or controlled by the user (Managed Distribution), other users on the Mac will be able to run it as well.

So VPP adds to the user's Apple ID purchase list, that user will need to go into App Store to install on that Mac. Just getting up to speed, if I'm off base please shout.

[zskidmor]

@donmontalvo, you are correct once the app is installed it can have multiple users run it, however these computers are not assigned to people, they are shared computers, how do I assign them to computers?

[donmontalvo · Accepted solution]

@zskidmor][/url Unless Apple broke their recommended mass deployment process, download it using an Apple ID specified for this sort of thing, package/deploy. The caveat with this process, the users may get update prompts but won't be able to update since the app is tied to the Apple ID used to get that deployed app.

For example:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT200165

PS, I sent feedback to Apple on this KB..."Only the Mac system on which Aperture was originally downloaded will be notified of application updates." may be wrong, should read something along the lines of "Only Macs that are logged in to Mac App Store using the Apple ID in which Aperture was originally downloaded will be notified of application updates."

[emily]

My guess is you create your image and deploy the app store apps, then when the app needs to be updated you push out the new image. If you have machines in labs that aren't deep-freezed or whatever, you could potentially create dummy Apple ID profiles tied to computers (MLF01@butler.edu, MLF02@butler.edu, etc.) but I doubt that would make updating them any easier, you'd still have to go in and manually update the apps yourself. I'd assume creating a package that you push to the machines would be easier; it would require one Apple ID and you could just rebuild the package and redeploy to the machines when needed.

[talkingmoose]

Apple's breaking the traditional model of licensing by selling licenses per user rather than per device. I haven't read their EULA lately but it use to state something like:

"This software is licensed for one user on multiple devices or for one device with multiple users."

My suggestion to customers has been to treat Apple-purchased software as per computer since 90%+ of software companies still license that way. This only makes it easier to track not necessarily less expensive.

[bentoms]

We deploy all our out under our company Apple ID.

We then update the apps via Casper when needed.

[calum_rmit]

except if the app checks the MAS receipt and requires the apple id to be entered to launch the app on any machine other than the one it was purchased on....splashtop remote i'm looking at you

[donmontalvo]

@calum_rmit I would reach out to the vendor to complain. AAMEE/CCP/RUM/etc. exist because Adobe was publicly lambasted and their arm was twisted enough for them to devote resources to appease enterprise admins. If a vendor is pulling that kind of cr@p I would call them out on it, using Adobe as an example.

[zskidmor]

I marked Don's answer as resolved, thanks for the feedback Don, it's basically what I anticipated the response to be. The app store is nice for consumers but not enterprise friendly, though I am glad that Apple is starting to think about it more.

-Zach

[St0rMl0rD]

@bentoms, how do you update them through Casper?

[bentoms]

@St0rMl0rD, the app's are downloaded using our institutional Apple ID.

We create DMG's of them & push them out to clients that have the older versions installed.

[St0rMl0rD]

Thanks, we'll give it a go, since we're also using 1 institutional Apple ID.