Enrollment Progress Feedback Apps

[Jason]

Watching the Webinar Zero to Productive they mention SplashBuddy, aDEPt, and DEPNotify. Has anyone tried all three and can offer a comparison?

It seems they all have their own pro's and con's. Any thoughts on how well they work, ease of maintaining/updating, etc?

[ndeal]

I've seen two of these - I've tested DEPNotify and Splashbuddy. Ultimately went with DEPNotify for simplicity's sake and am actively using this for our builds (started in the last month). Feedback from the support team has been very positive (previously they had no feedback on completion when building a machine via enrollment). DEPNotify has a package installer. Worked with a JAMF PSE on the implementation, the PSE built a launchagent for it as well to ensure the window comes up ASAP during DEP enrollments. Splashbuddy is fancy/cool, but it's a lot of effort for what is a relatively minimal process on our side - our builds are not complex. If you need a really slick experience splashbuddy might be for you, but know that it requires a lot more configuration for icons, specific package names, etc. DEP Notify is a much simpler interface where you don't have a list of items that are to be configured showing completion along the way - you get a progress bar and you can change the "what is happening now" type of text to inform a user as to what is happening. DEPNotify has options for info gathering from users, if that is of interest. I have not used aDEPt so can't speak to that, sorry.

[Jason]

That's good feedback @ndeal . Managing images for each app might not be too bad and could help improve the look. But I don't like needing to rename all of my packages just to get it working. It'd definitely be better if I could leave the package names as-is and just reference them since I already have a standard naming convention (straight Vendor Product Version.pkg)

[mattphillips]

Yes. DEPNotify is definitely simple to setup and fun to configure. @Jason For SplashBuddy, you dont actually need to rename your packages on the distribution point. You can simply change the "display name" in jamf. If you are in an environment where you have a very strict naming scheme for all of your packages... it might be less work to just customize one line in xcode. The package name parsing regex inside SplashBuddy can be modified to match the naming convention you already use.

SplashBuddy by default looks for "{name}-{version}.pkg".

There is a complete kickstarting guide on shufflepuck GitHub for SplashBuddy. I've found that people often get turned off by the idea of building all new policies with special numbering and naming just to get it to work. But, smooth reliable provisioning can be accomplished more simply with just a script that calls policies by trigger name. regardless of what UFBI you choose to use.

We covered the User Feed Back Interaction apps including aDEPt at JNUC last year. At that time is was called "DEP Enrollment". One of my favorite features about it is the Spinners and the ability to show a "next steps" window after provisioning completes. Check out Advanced Zero Touch DEP for more info if you haven't already seen it.

[arjanhuis]

@matthew.phillips Could you maybe elaborate a bit more on the "less work to customise one line in xcode"?
I've tried to find this one line but not sure if I'm at the right place... ;)

When I open the splash buddy project in xcode I find a Regexes.swift file in a folder called Tools (inside a folder called "SplashBuddy").
I see a couple of lines that deal with package names. Am I at the right place?

Thanks

[arjanhuis]

Double post... :s