VPP Invitations for Open Access Macs

[CCNapier]

We have many open access Macs that our student base (in theory, up to 16000 users) can walk up to and use. We have some App Store Apps (free) that we want to distribute to these Macs.

How should I go about distributing the apps to these Macs? We want it installed on each Mac for use by any user that logs in. These Macs are Yosemite 10.5.5, AD joined - users log in with their AD account and a majority will not have an Apple ID.

We have set up:
- A valid VPP token
- Mac Store Apps listed in Casper with enough licenses,
- VPP assignments for the App for "All Users, Limited to an AD group"
- VPP Invitation for "All Users, Limited to an AD group", available through Self Service.

If I understand correctly, the invites are only displayed to those users that Casper has reported as the "Mac User" and also in the appropriate AD group. This means that we cannot push the Mac Store Apps to Macs that we don't have "user details" for??

I assume I have to use the package capture to distribute these apps?

(Side note: As far as I am aware, El Capitan/future Casper will allow machine assignments, but that won't help for now).

[davidacland]

Hi,

VPP on 10.10 is based around 1-to-1 deployments unfortunately. I normally use the method documented by @rtrouton to grab the app installers on shared use Macs.

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/downloading-apples-server-app-installer-package/

Once you're onto 10.11 things will hopefully get easier :)

[CCNapier]

@davidacland Thanks, working fine.
BTW, do you know of any links about VPP with Casper for El Capitan? Can we do machine based App Store installs yet? I couldn't find anything with my searches...

[davidacland]

I haven't tried it yet, although I've been told by some others that it works.

If you've got VPP setup it would be worth trying out.

[blackholemac]

Rich's trick works and works well, but there is a catch...if an app developer implements receipt checking, it won't work. A lot of free app vendors implement receipt checking and it shuts the technique down on first launch of the app on a computer that wasn't the one that originally downloaded it.

Don't get me wrong, it is a great trick, but that loophole seems to be slowly closing.

[bpavlov]

You can create a dummy receipt using a simple line like this:
touch /Applications/APPNAME.app/Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt

[CCNapier]

Fingers crossed the per machine VPP deployment will resolve this anyway, but the receipt issue is noted; thank you.