Composer PKG vs Native Install

[dreh15]

It's been many years since I've used Composer and it was wonderful back in the day for imaging. 

Since imaging is dead, I'm wondering if creating Composer packages, say of Microsoft Office and/or Adobe Creative Cloud would result in a faster way to install those products on new computers? 

I'm in a very small environment, less than a dozen users, and new installs don't occur very often, but seems like adding all the apps takes about three hours. So, just wanting to understand if packaging those apps with Composer would shave some time off the installs?

Thanks in advance.

[taugust_ric]

These days I only use Composer for packages that either don't come in .pkg format, or require re-packaging to work for Enterprise deployment.

From personal experience, I re-package all the Adobe applications that are downloaded from the Adobe Creative Cloud Admin Console in Composer so that they are in a modern/proper Apple "flat" package format.

All of Microsoft's packages these days are pretty enterprise friendly, so I use the packages that come from their download site, macadmins.software.

I also use Composer to re-package .dmg only installers, like Firefox, Cyberduck, BBEdit, etc.  It's going to be mostly personal preference at this point on how much you use Composer.

[mickl089]

You can download Firefox as PKG: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
Just search for your needed version / language!

for all other dmg: just drop the *.app in your programs folder and type this terminal command:
sudo productbuild --component "/Applications/appname.app" /Users/yourUserName/Desktop/appname.pkg

no need of composer for many apps ;-)

[obi-k]

We touched on this topic in a recent thread...

https://community.jamf.com/t5/jamf-pro/to-use-composer-or-not/m-p/270331#M246909