Best Practices for swapping app with App Store Equivalent?

[jonconn]

Hi everybody!

I'm in the process of starting to swap out some apps like Slack with their App Store version. Does anyone have guides/pointers/experience on how they did something like this? I've already "bought" enough licenses for my users, and I can easily scope at-will, so I've got those two parts knocked down.

The Indiana Jones-style swap is where I'm puzzling. If anyone has any experience with this kind of situation, I'd love to have your insights on the matter!

[jbisgett]

I believe you would want to scope the app to your desired devices and on the General tab of the app, check Make App Managed When Possible, along with Make App Managed if currently installed as Unmanaged. This changes the app license on the device without the end user really seeing anything. The app license will just update on the device to the VPP license that you have scoped out.

[jonconn]

Normally, I'd take that approach, but these particular apps are downloaded from provider sites. Has it been your experience that this does the swap as well?

[jbisgett]

I haven't had any experience with provider sites apps. I would think the process would be the same. My suggestion in that case would be to scope the app to one device that has the provider site app on it and see what happens. If it works as expected, then you could just change the scope to all of your desired devices.

[jonconn]

That's fair - I'll definitely be doing that, but I wanted to see if anyone out there had my conundrum and was able to share the results of their work before I started beating a deployment policy into shape with a stick. :-)

[jbisgett]

I love beating deployment policies with a stick, keeps them from being uppity :-)