Casper Suit and the App store

[scharman]

Hi I manage around 100 macs with Casper Suite and I was wondering if theres any way to make it that people download install apps from Self service rather than the App store.

Does anyone have a process in place for this? If I just run a script to delete the App store that would be fine but people will whinge that they cant update their existing apps, is there a script to run in Casper to find out already installed apps on client machines? Or shall i make it whenever people want an app added/updated thy need to call or email the IT department.
Cheers

[davidacland]

Hi @scharman, yes there are two ways you can do this.

The first method is to take the installer packages (or re-package an app you want to distribute), add it to Casper using Casper Admin and create a policy to deploy it via self service.

The second option is to jump straight to adding a Mac App Store app (an option in the side bar in the JSS window). This lets you select an app from the Mac App Store in the JSS window and scope it to computers to appear in self service. The only catch with this is that it really only adds a link to the app store for that particular app, it doesn't add the installer to the JSS directly.

If you haven't looked at it already I would recommend referring to the Casper Administration Guide in the Casper Suite disk image as it will include exact step by step instructions for the above methods I've described.

[calumhunter]

just curious why you do not want users to be able to download and update apps themselves? Surely having the users do the grunt work for you is a good thing™?

[CasperSally]

You can use a configuration profile to set restrictions to blacklist /Applications/App Store.app/ (we whitelist /Applications)

[ImAMacGuy]

@calumhunter - we face a similar issue, but ours is licensing and support related. we need to control the software going onto the machine, which unfortunately puts a lot of work back on us rather than let the system do it's thing. We don't want users buying any which program and then expect the company to reimburse them for it, rather than go through the channels and have the app vetted and a single point of purchase.

@CasperSally - if you BL App Store, how do you get updates?

[CasperSally]

@jwojda - all updates come from JSS, not from the app store. We vet them here and push what we want.

I wish Apple would go the Microsoft route and make all updates in smaller pieces rather lumping everything into 1GB OS point updates. Those are too big for us to hope for successful install (with students opening/closing lids all day long), so we do an annual reimage to latest OS as well because of that.

A few updates recently have been released as small updates (NTP/bash fix) that we pushed successfully.

[calumhunter]

@jwojda wow really? users will buy with their own appleid, own credit card and only then ask if it will be reimbursed? guess they would only do that once!

are the users admins?

you can set a config profile to disable the app store making it only for updates
theres a few keys you can set for example:

<string>App Store Configuration</string>
           <key>restrict-store-softwareupdate-only</key>
           <false/>
           <key>restrict-store-disable-app-adoption</key>
           <true/>
          <key>restrict-store-require-admin-to-install</key>
          <true/>

[scharman]

Ok
I've made some headway on this, I can block the App store by setting up a configuration profile, the other problem I've ran into is distributing apps using VPP and self service, if App store is unblocked I can install apps via self service I have assigned out, yet but not when its blocked. Self service just errors out.

There must be a way to distribute app store apps while blocking free for all access to the app store.

anyone made any headway on this?

Cheers

[scharman]

found away around this(sorta) is to package up the apps using composer then distribute them via policy