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Structuring policies and smart groups

pandrum
New Contributor III

Posted on ‎01-09-2018 04:29 AM

Hey y'all.

We've setup our Jamf Pro and our now testing and playing with policies and smart groups. I am curious to see how others have structured and planned their policies and smart groups. We are planning on making as many programs we can available for users via Self Service.

A sample from some testing below.

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Some questions:

  • Best practise of structuring policies? For example, gather every policy that installs something under one category and name it "Installs". Make another category for housekeeping and maintenance and name it "Maintenance". Make a third with uninstaller for programs and name the category "Uninstallers" and so on. Is this a suitable approach?

  • Best practise for adding computers to licensed software? For example, we use Adobe Creative Cloud and are only allowed x number of licenses. Can you create a static group for this like "Adobe CC" and add computers to this group whenever a user requests it? This in turn are scoped to a policy which installs the software.

  • Best practise regarding updates? For example, Firefox is made available in Self Service for download with execution frequency set to Ongoing. When an update is released, do you have a separate policy for updates to Firefox, or do you simply switch out the package in the Self Service policy for the new one?

Reason for this post is that I've heard from other Jamf admins that policies and smart groups can quickly be messy. I want to avoid this as much as possible when laying the foundation.

Thanks!

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jonlju
Contributor

Posted on ‎01-09-2018 04:58 AM

I don't have a good answer for the first two as we don't have a ton of policies (I alone manage about 100 Macs and 150 iPhones in my company), structure really isn't a problem. We have them structured under general headers like "Collaboration" (for software like Skype For Business etc.), a section for "Support" and similar.

Regarding updates, we (I) use a policy for Self Service just like you do, and then a separate policy for updating software automatically scoped to a smart group containing computers with that specific app. We use AutoPkgr to automatically add packages to the JSS, we use the "Install latest"-policies to test the application before publishing it for updates.

It can get messy easily, but thankfully for a smaller organization like the one I work for, it's quite easy to keep track.

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