Deploying VPP apps to machines with app already installed from other source

[brady_ingledue]

Hi!

Is there a way to deploy a VPP app to macOS that already have the app installed by just downloading from vendor's website? The issue that I am having is that my end-users need admin credentials to update these publicly downloaded apps, so I want to utilize VPP and have them update without admin needed.

I have assigned the VPP app to a few machines with the app already installed and the Self Service button just says "Open" and opens the app.

Anybody have any recommendations that will cause minimal disruption to the end-user?

Thanks!!!

[geoff_widdowson]

You have to uninstall the non-VPP version first. You can't manage an app you never deployed using VPP. It's a pain that most people moving to VPP have to deal with. You could remove the existing app with an uninstall policy before pushing out the VPP, that would be the lease distruption method to end-users.

[brady_ingledue]

I wrote a script removing the app, "rm -rf /Applications/Slack.app", had user run it from Self Service and it removed it from app folder. Then I scoped the VPP version to their machine and had them install from Self Service. It just hangs on "Installing" and does not complete.

I did notice that it pulls the app down to this folder: "~/Library/Caches/com.tinyspeck.slackmacgap.ShipIt/update.OZNquKD/", but it doesn't install.

Any ideas? Thanks!!

[jphillips]

We have absolutely zero luck trying to distribute VPP apps through Self Service. I'd say it probably works less than 10% of the time. Direct device distribution seems to work fine, however.

[pknomad]

Hey Brady,

Did you ever decide on how to solve this problem? I'm thinking it might be best to scope it out to computers that enrolled in Jamf in the last 48 hours. I'd love to be able to just scope it to all end-user devices and get rid of the old policy. Not sure if there is a graceful way of doing this.

I'd love to confirm the behavior of VPP-deployed Slack on end user computers that has slack installed. If VPP-deployed Slack only gets deployed on computers without Slack, I might end up just deploying Slack to all end devices and let computers that had Slack deployed through policies get phased out naturally.

Jason