Skype for Business install via Policy gotcha

Suspicious Package is great, but it doesn't show you everything about a package. I've used Pacifist for a while, which will show you a fuller picture of the installer. In this case what you need to see is the Distribution file, which contains:

<pkg-ref id="com.microsoft.SkypeForBusiness">
   <must-close>
       <app id="com.apple.Safari"/>
       <app id="org.mozilla.firefox"/>
       <app id="com.microsoft.SkypeForBusiness"/>
       <app id="com.microsoft.Lync"/>
       <app id="com.microsoft.Outlook"/>
    </must-close>

@dsavageED Thanks for the explanation (and the Pacifist referral). Seems odd that if there's a must-close list the non-interactive install process wouldn't report a failure instead of no error.

I'd agree it is a bit odd. The only workaround I can think of (that doesn't involve re-packaging) is to add a script to the policy to do a check if any of those apps are running and throw up a jamfhelper or applescript message.

I had a similar error and ended out repackaging .... not the best solution but I needed to get Skype to our users.

I had a similar error and ended out repackaging .... not the best solution but I needed to get Skype to our users.

I put a note in the Self Service policy telling users to quit these apps before they run it. Users being users, I just created a script to run BEFORE the pkg anyway.

#!/bin/bash

# MS Skype For Business requires that Safari, Firefox, Skype for Business, Lync, and
# Outlook must be quit before the installer can run. Otherwise the installer will fail.
# This will gracefully quit the apps, but if files need to be saved, the script will wait until the user saves or discards.

osascript -e 'quit app "Microsoft Outlook"'
osascript -e 'quit app "Firefox"'
osascript -e 'quit app "Skype for Business"'
osascript -e 'quit app "Safari"'

#pkill on Lync because it is a pain in the ass to gracefully quit
pkill Lync

exit 0

Thanks for the feedback @sdagley and @AVmcclint. I've put a request into the Skype for Business team as we should be able to make a modification to the postinstall script, and introduce a preinstall script to take care of these issues automatically when installing with Jamf Pro.

Thanks, Paul.

Hate to ask you to do this @sdagley and @AVmcclint , but if either of you have a Premier account, can you raise a ticket for this, and ask it to be routed to Sustained Engineering (SE) for inclusion in the next version of SfB for Mac?

Thanks! Paul.

@pbowden No problem (other than I don’t know what level our MS account is, but I’ll find out). Thanks for the info on how to escalate this.

@sdagley thanks. The Skype for Business bug bar is high, and their triage team will only fix it if the request comes directly from a Premier customer, and not from another engineering team like mine. I sent them the fix already, so if you can, reference Epic:1465094 and they should know exactly what to do!

Thanks! Paul.

@pbowden I had that request submitted via our Premier support account, but have now gotten word back that the design change was rejected by the product group (which I presume is the Skype for Business team). Thanks for looking into the problem, I'll just script around it for future installations.