JSS Upgrade Best Practices

[duffcalifornia]

As we're just starting to use Casper Suite in our environment, I wondered what some of the accepted best practices are for upgrading the JSS. Do people generally upgrade as soon as JAMF releases a new version (or shortly thereafter)? Or do people generally stick with a working version of the JSS until either it doesn't work or a needed feature is introduced?

[Brad_G]

There are several posts about this and probably as many different answers.

First and most important in my mind is setup a test environment. There are things you'll do in your environment that are likely custom/different than others. Something that may be very important to you may not work as expected in a new release. So test test test.

Myself if things are working well I may not update just to update. Don't fix what isn't broken. If there are bug fixes or features I think apply to our environment then I'll start the testing process.

[Taylor_Armstron]

Agree with Brad - you can request a development license from JAMF for a test box, which is invaluable.

For us, updates are basically determined by two things:

a) Is it a security patch/upgrade? If yes, upgrade ASAP.
b) If not security, are there new features that will make an impact to our workflow in a positive way? If yes, upgrade within a week or two after testing, if not, we're generally happy to wait until the next round.

One other "lesson learned" that I ran into with our upgrade to 9.96... we'd apparently "patched" Java at some point with the latest JRE, not JDK. The installer does not like that, and threw an error when the expected path (including "JDK" in the path) was not found. Fortunately, JAMF's customer support is among the best I've encountered, and the installer logs are relatively easy to parse, but definitely the kind of thing that is easy to miss.