How to manage an unmanaged MacOS app (Pages, iMovie etc)

andrew_betts
New Contributor II

Mac notebooks ship with Pages, Keynote etc preinstalled, and I am looking for the best method for changing these MacOS apps from unmanaged to managed. There is no 'manage app if currently unmanaged' option in the Mac App Store Apps section like there is in the Mobile Device Apps section. If you add licenses via ASM and then scope out in a policy on Jamf Pro, it will register as a spent license on the device, but does not seem to change it over to managed. Still can't force updates etc. So is the only way to manage these preinstalled apps to delete them and then reinstall via a new policy? This seems to work, but will be a lot of extra work.

edit- I get that we could scope the licenses to the user level and the app would then become managed when the user signs in with their institution Apple ID. But in this case, I am dealing with our fleet of laptops at the elementary level, where the kids are too young to manage app updates, so looking to do this on the device level so IT can manage all updates.

1 REPLY 1

chrisyeo
New Contributor II

This is something that is supported as of Big Sur, but I don't think Jamf have yet implemented the required functionality from the MDM specification to allow management of existing installs.

Taken from Apple documentation:

ChangeManagementState string The change management state. The only supported state is: Managed: Take management of the app if the user installed it already. This also requires that you pass true for InstallAsManaged. This value is available in iOS 9 and later, macOS 11 and later, and tvOS 10.2 and later. Value: Managed