ProTip - Generating a report listing all installed version numbers of an app

[sdagley]

I forget the origins of this, but posting since it's extremely useful...

You can do an Advanced Computer Search on Applications to list all of the different versions of an application installed on managed Macs, but as of this writing there is no mechanism to export that report.

You can do an Advanced Computer Search on Computers with Application Title and Application Version criteria, but that just selects the computers that match the criteria and doesn't list the version numbers in the report.

Here's the ProTip...

If you create a Smart Computer Group with an Application Title criteria and Operator "is" clicking View will show you a report of all Macs with that application, but notice there is no version information displayed. However, if you click Export (it doesn't matter if you select Comma-Seperated Values or XML) the exported report includes an Application Version field.

[Geelcey]

Hey, Another way which may be beneficial is creating a custom Extension attribute (Via a script) which will specifically look for the version number of the app on a machine

(within the info.plist for example plutil -p /Applications/Keynote.app/Contents/Info.plist | grep CFBundleShortVersionString)

then when you generate a report, you can output the string from the EA.

[sdagley]

@Geelcey Yes, it's simple to create an EA to collect the CFBundleShortVersionString for an app of interest, but the point of the tip is that the application version data already exists in Jamf Pro but there is no obvious way to produce a report with it.

[Geelcey]

Yep! just thought this may help with the reporting was all 🙂 

[bartlomiejsojka]

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@sdagley wrote:

(…) You can do an Advanced Computer Search on Applications to list all of the different versions of an application installed on managed Macs, but as of this writing there is no mechanism to export that report. (…)

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Actually there is and has been since Casper days. Just change the Inventory Item to Applications when you export a csv. If you're after the entire list from your fleet, just perform an empty search or an advanced one without criteria for this. The first will get you app names, versions, computer names + whatever you have set in Inventory Display. The second will obviously let you tailor Display options to your needs.

[sdagley]

@bartlomiejsojka The issue I have with the report generated when using Applications as the Inventory item for export is that each version number only appears once in the row for the first computer with that version installed. For the data to be useful as a sortable report you'd have to run another script to massage the data and fill in the missing version number field for each computer in the report with a blank entry. Exporting the Smart Computer Group provides the version info for every computer in the report.

[bartlomiejsojka]

I agree the format of that report is a bit problematic, but in that case I would say you'd probably have to rephrase the problem you've solved with that tip.

Still a great tip, especially since you can specify more titles with subsequent „or Application Title” criteria. Again, I would add that with Inventory Display options you can also add additional columns to such report, although it's far from perfect.

As for those empty fields in global App report, here's another „pro tip”:

1. Open MS Excel and import UTF-8 data from .csv text file. By default and typically, you should end up with „Application Title” in A1 and „1Password” in A2 🤣, so let's assume that,
2. Shift–select A and B columns and press F5 to open Go To menu. Choose Special…,
3. Choose Select Blanks and confirm with OK,
4. Now you should probably have A3 active with all other blanks selected as well. Type =A2 in it as formula and hit Control+Enter.
5. All blanks will be filled with the value of the populated field above. These will be formulas though, so again select columns A and B, Command+C, Control+Command+V and choose Values.
6. Happy sorting!

[sdagley]

@bartlomiejsojka Thank you! That is a very handy tip for using Excel to fill in missing fields.

[Akowy]

Many thx @bartlomiejsojka for your tips :-).