Strategy for JSS pushing updates in higher education?

[mccallister]

I now have our 500+ macs enrolled in JAMF. Now I need to start pushing updates via policies. How best to do this?

The issue for me is that in higher education, is that it is not like a normal business where I can just push updates on a particular day of the week and time. There can be various labs going on, classes, faculty all have different schedules, and there are many notebooks that may not even be on campus.

What strategies have those of you in higher ed used with JSS for updating Macs?

[jmahlman]

We update all of our academic public machines overnight; between 10pm and 5am. Basically we just run softwareupdate -ai every night. We have an internal SUS, so we block updates we don't want to install.

As for notebooks, we just let the users handle their own updates, we try not to force the hand there. If you need to be a little more on top of things, you can just make a policy that checks for updates and shows a notification to the user that there are updates available. You can enable deferments on that too.

EDIT: Fixed my command

[mccallister]

jmahlman, could you post the full command with the arguments you use so I can get an idea of how one does that?

[jmahlman]

Sorry, it's 'softwareupdate -ai'.

I have a Smart group that checks if the software update server is set on the system to our internal one (we use a config profile to push that out):

Then, the policy we have just runs the command on machines in that group after hours:

That smart group will not work for you, you'll have to alter it of course..this is designed for use with our receipts, etc.

[thoule]

I'm in a similar environment - I need to encourage, but not immediately force updates. I wrote a couple tools to do that. https://github.com/tmhoule/AppUpdates

I've got a new version coming out in a bit that will cache updates so users are not prompted until the update is ready to install - that'll help with big (Office!) updates.