No more Jamf Remote...now what?

[jonathan_massey]

I wanted to reach out to this forum to see what you all are planning to do when Jamf Remote goes away. As a large K-12 enterprise, our campus tech's rely on Jamf Remote's ability to push commands to devices WAY more than they do the ability to screen share. Our users aren't administrators on our machines, and we don't use localadmin accounts, so SSH-ing into a machine is also not in the cards. We're going to be in quite the pickle.

I'd like to know how others plan to address this, and if there is anything out there than can leverage JAMF remote's abilities that perhaps we don't know about.

[skinford]

There is a feature request you can vote on to bring it or something better like it back.

https://ideas.jamf.com/ideas/JN-I-26370

[khurram]

slowly and gradually they are pushing us away

[khurram]

Jamf Remote was way quicker as compared to sending the commands via Jamf Pro. The logs were also instant. Jamf Remote has its own value. Don't compare Apples with Oranges. No more unattended screen sharing to lab computers. And the list of pains continue ...

[Discher]

You killed Jamf Remote?  Weren't we paying for that?

[skinford]

I had thought that we were paying for it as part of the tools.  But, makes you think if they kill that what else will they kill without even asking the community?  I just wish they'd bring it back and admit they screwed up.

[Icka]

My thinking exactly. Did the cost of JAMF Pro go way down or are we playing the same for less. I know some people say we should look for other ways, but why?? What we had, Jamf Remote, was working. Now we are supposed to pay more out of pocket to do the same thing. That just does not seem right.

[DanJ_LRSFC]

Wait are you saying there's a paid tool that does what Jamf Remote did? Because I'd be interested in that.

[skinford]

I think @Icka may have been talking about paying for TeamViewer.  But that only does the remoting of systems not the automatic pushing of Policies.  I'm not sure either.

[wolfhead]

I do not believe there is at all - but JAMFs 'solution' is to suggest TeamViewer which not only does not provide, as far as I can tell, ANY of the functionality that JAMF Remote actually had, and is a paid product in itself so we pay the same for JAMF, for less tools and then they suggest we just go and pay for other products to do what their product already did.

If they can turn around and provide an explanation which makes sense such as "we discontinued Remote because with M processors Apple not longer allows X......" then fine, but I've not seen anything explaining this discontinuation from them and maybe the M processor thing is a bad example as I know it worked on M processor macs but you get my point.  The tool worked perfectly on every single Mac we had from the oldest to the newest right up until they removed it and there is no replacement.

Certainly one can send commands via Apple Remote Desktop, but the ability to simply select apps, and profiles from in remote which were missing and push then to a computer made it such a great "in the moment" fix.

[mm2270]

The sad reality is there is nothing to replace Jamf Remote out there. Nothing can do the things it did because it was a uniquely developed tool specific to Jamf Pro. What it did under the hood was used the Jamf management account, which in many environments could be using a randomized password, to SSH into a remote Mac using it's last known IP address from the Jamf Pro console, set up a 'policy on the fly' based on the items you checked, and then tell the Mac to check into Jamf to run that policy. 

I can't think of any tool out there that could accomplish that. Closest thing would be Apple Remote Desktop, but that doesn't tie into Jamf in any way really, so you'd have to have any packages and scripts locally on your admin Mac to push them.

[Mithrandir]

Seems to me that the only quasi-similar product is the iOS app, QuickLook, which appears to do some of things Jamf Remote did.