Poll: How many hours does your team give to packaging / Casper maintenance a week?

[danny_hanes]

We haven't had Casper very long, but we are have discussions around how many man hours a week will be needed to keep Casper up and running. This would mostly include packaging and general JSS maintenance.

I realize the answer from everyone will probably be "it depends" but I wanted to find out how many hours are week are dedicated to Casper in your environment.

[emily]

I probably spent most of my week working on Casper for the first month or two. Now it's just the one hour or so for upgrades whenever those happen, and maybe 1-2 hours a day once a week or so with packaging depending upon how many updates are released. But we do have a relatively small environment and users that are admins of their computers, so we're a bit more hands-off than some other environments.

[davidacland]

I'd really have to say "it depends" I'm afraid. For one of our sites (as an example), we don't do imaging, just self service policy based app delivery and a few settings. In these cases its a few hours a month at most.

For some of our other clients, where they have hundreds of different software titles (some of them really tricky), full netboot and imaging services, we're spending 20+ hours per week keeping things going.

For me, the main factors are:

- What software and settings are being deployed - How the software and settings are being deployed (imaging, "push" install, self service etc - How the OSes are being deployed (if at all) - How much Enterprise integration is involved (AD, Certificates, 802.1X, WPA2 Wifi etc) - And finally, the potential scale of the damage you can cause will have a bearing on how much testing, re-testing and then more testing you will do

[rtrouton]

If you can get AutoPkg and the JSS AutoPkg integration working*, you may find yourself doing a lot less work packaging than you may anticipate.

*AutoPkgr can handle a lot of that: http://www.lindegroup.com/autopkgr. To get started with this, I recommend checking out the presentation that Elliot Jordan gave at the last JNUC: https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=12280

[rlincoln]

Team? you guys have a team? :) It is myself and one other person that manage Casper for 900+ clients. We each spend 10% of our time managing Casper. But I echo what @davidacland said "it depends". I typically take a day every other week to be "heads down" unless their are fires to put out. Most of my role is packaging and testing. Looking forward to what JAMF has in store for Patch Management.

[dvasquez]

I def need to get this AutoPkg down. I spend hours depending on how many updates are availabe during specific times in the early month. Then it is not so bad as updates are easy to create. I would say roughly 4 hours three times a month, depending.

[Chris_Hafner]

I'm not sure scale matters as much as institutional complexity. I handle Casper all by my lonesome. Including the servers and all related tech. This is for about 650 concurrent OS X Units and a handful of iOS devices. I'd say that most of the time I'm just keeping tabs on our software footprint and making sure that we're all up to date and running. Overall I spend maybe 10% of my time administering and packaging things... but overall, it's a huge timesaver compared to where I was 5 years ago (sans JAMF). That said, there are times of the year I've dedicated to major JAMF overhauls and such. Those weeks can be as much as 80% JAMF. There are just not that many of those weeks.