Smart Computer Groups and Software deployment

[jhuls]

I'm looking to configure all of our software deployments and updates done via policies to be managed via Smart Computer Groups. The policy would be set to ongoing and the group would essentially be telling the policy whether to do something or not.

We're running 9.6 and in trying to work with the groups I can configure a group to check for systems that don't have a particular piece of software and a group to check if a system needs an updated version but when I try to combine that into one group, I'm having trouble making that work. Has anyone done this?

Yes, I could setup and use the two groups but I was hoping to reduce the number of groups. We have a number of different apps so the more we can keep the number of groups down, the better.

[mm2270]

I'm not sure what specific problem you're seeing, but at a high level, what we do is something like the following:

(   Application Title  |  Has  |  "MyApp.app"
    Application Version  | is not  | "some version"
    <Plus whatever other criteria is needed here> )
Or  Application Title  |  does not have  |  "MyApp.app"

Not the "Or" Basically, the first grouping says, 'if this application is installed, but the version of it doesn't match what we expect, the Mac belongs in this group'. The second part says 'If this application is not installed at all, the Mac belongs in this group'

Does that help?

[jhuls]

That was one of the methods I tried but when I try to save it, I get the following message...

"Criteria following a criteria group can only be joined by an AND operator."

If I reverse the order then it automatically changes the "Or" to an "And" with no way to change it back.

[mm2270 · Accepted solution]

Sorry, my bad. We aren't using the open and close parens around the first set of criteria. Remove those so its all one grouping and it should allow you to save the Smart Group.

[jhuls]

Thanks...that worked.

It makes more sense to me to have those open/close parens in there so I never bothered to try without it.