Combining Packages

[Ricky]

Hello everyone!

I have five Microsoft Office packages that I would like to combine into one larger installer. Is that possible? We would like to package it up as one major monthly update e.g. MicrosoftOffice_January2018.pkg

Is this possible to do using Composer?

[steve_summers · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ricky , just a couple questions for you. First, are you using MAU in your environment to keep your Office installs current as possible? (Microsoft Auto Update)
Second, and this is what I may not understand from your post. It's possible to go here and pull the latest Office suite, which has all Office components, Word, Excel, etc.

https://macadmins.software/

If you were not allowed to use MAU, or for some reason it wouldn't work for you, one would be able to go to the MacAdmins site there and pull once a month the latest full installer. Then, you just drop it into Jamf Admin and that's it.

Hope that helps.

[CapU]

Create a policy with all of the packages you want to be installed and any scripts that you need to run, then scope to your Computer Groups

[steve_summers · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ricky , just a couple questions for you. First, are you using MAU in your environment to keep your Office installs current as possible? (Microsoft Auto Update)
Second, and this is what I may not understand from your post. It's possible to go here and pull the latest Office suite, which has all Office components, Word, Excel, etc.

https://macadmins.software/

If you were not allowed to use MAU, or for some reason it wouldn't work for you, one would be able to go to the MacAdmins site there and pull once a month the latest full installer. Then, you just drop it into Jamf Admin and that's it.

Hope that helps.

[mm2270 · Accepted solution]

Outside of the good recommendations above, to answer your question, it is possible to put them into Composer, but the only effective way to do this would be to drop all the separate installers into a new folder in /private/tmp/ or some other standard location, and then drag that folder into Composer to create a new source. Then add in a postinstall script and create a script to loop over all pkgs in that folder and install them one at a time. Finally, I would have the script cleanup by deleting the folder in /tmp/ with the installers in it, since they will likely take up a lot of room. The package would need to be built in pkg format to use the postinstall script.

I personally think getting a full updated installer once and a while makes more sense than doing the above, but there it is, in case you still want to go that route.

[Ricky]

Thanks @steve.summers and @mm2270! We pulled the installer down from macadmins.software and also got the volume license. Built out a policy that installed both. The Office install was priority 10 and the licenser was priority 15 to ensure the installed sequentially. Works perfect for fresh installs as well as updates.

I didn't know you could just install the entire suite at once, but apparently that's an option now!

Our plan is to do monthly updates that have been vetted by our department, as opposed to having the clients auto-update. We've been bitten by that in the past with compatibility issues and it makes our teachers upset when we say we are waiting for a fix from Microsoft. Oh well, that's just the way it goes!

Thanks for the help!

[CapU]

@Ricky I remove MAU, disable autoupdates and push all the updates my self. I can't trust users to do the updates in a timely manner. I use a VM to test my packaged before I deploy them