It must be 8 or 9 years ago that I started supporting customers with ZuluDesk (now Jamf School). This was my first step into the device management world. Before that, I was a repair technician.
As my curiosity grew, I was lucky enough that my employer allowed me to do the Jamf 100 and 200 courses. Managing iOS devices is all good and well, but with Mac you need a little more tools. Things like setting a wallpaper sound easy, but they actually require a bit more work than I expected.
Welcome to the world of Mac Admins! I discovered that for everything I wanted to figure out how to do, there is usually someone with the same question, and maybe they’ve already found a solution for it. Coming in as a completely new Mac Admin, it might be a bit difficult to find your way. But knowing the right people, tools or places to ask for help are really valuable and make all the difference.
So I thought, why not try and create some sort of list with starting points for finding answers? Here’s my list of resources:
Jamf Blog – Your source for any news related to Jamf
Jamf Nation – Jamf’s very own community. Since you’re reading this you already found this one 😊
Jamf Concepts - Solutions and plug-ins for Jamf's ecosystem of products built by Jamfs.
Mac Admins Slack – Your one stop shop with channels for just about every project and almost everyone is on there.
Mac Admins News – A weekly newsletter with a summary of what's happening in the MacAdmins world, curated by Jamf’s very own celebrity MacAdmin, Armin Briegel.
HCS Technology Group technical articles – Extensive write ups on how to configure various tools. This actually helped me out a lot when setting up DEPNotify for the first time.
That’s quite a lot already, right? So let's get a little more specific with helpful people you might have heard of and the areas that they’re specialized in (in no particular order):
Krypted – Personal blog of Charles Edge. I haven’t had the pleasure to meet Charles in person, but he was one of the most memorable people within the MacAdmins community. He was always happy to help, and very insightful. Rest in peace Charles. And thank you, for everything.
Scriptingosx.com – Blog from Armin Briegel, maybe best known for Installomator.
Snelson.us – Blog from Dan K. Snelson, maybe best known for Setup-Your-Mac
Travelling Tech Guy – Blog from Frederick Abeloos, Jamf genius maybe best known for his technical articles on Jamf Connect
Derflounder – Blog from Rich Trouton (ex-SAP, now Jamf). I ‘discovered’ Rich’s blog whilst researching creating packages. He has a couple splendid talks (JNUC, Penn State,etc.) as well.
Motionbug – Blog from Rob Potvin. Consulting engineer at Jamf, his name pops up all over the place. His recent talk at the Benelux MacAdmins User group meet-up about VM’s was very insightful!
Modtitan – Blog from Emily Kausalik. As one of the founding members of the Mac Admins Foundation, it is hard not to come across her profile. I really enjoyed her Jamf @ Jamf talk at JNUC 2023.
Graham R Pugh – Graham is probably best known for the Erase Install tool used across the globe to upgrade and clean install macOS.
MacMule – Personal blog of Jamf all-star Ben Toms. Ben has popped up with sessions around the globe (JNUC, MacAdUk,etc.). Very insightful blog with loads of good topics. Hard to cherry pick one here.
AppleShareIT – Personal blog of Mischa Van Der Bent. Mischa is known for a lot of things but I ‘discovered’ Mischa thanks to his SetDock script in conjunction with Dockutil. One of the first tools I started using when playing around with Jamf Pro.
Boberito – Personal blog of Bob Gendler. Lots of insightful things about security here; Bob is one of the main contributors to the macOS security compliance project.
Rocketman.tech – Rocketman may not be that known in Europe, but in the US Rocketman is a Jamf only, Apple only, Managed Service Provider. They host a monthly user group called LaunchPad and have a corresponding blog with many insightful articles.
Quite a list already, right? I know! But I wouldn’t want to leave you without adding my favorite projects (not mentioned above) that our company uses in almost every install we do.
Swift Dialog (by Bart Reardon) – Tool that presents custom dialogs, displays informative messages, or can be used as a form to request user input.
Desktoppr (by Armin Briegel) – Tool that sets wallpapers on a Mac.
App Auto Patch (by Robert Schroeder) – Tool that leverages Installomator to update all apps with available Installomator recipes.
Escrow Buddy (By Netflix) - Is a macOS authorization plugin that allows MDM administrators to generate and escrow new FileVault personal recovery keys on Macs that lack a valid escrowed key in MDM.
Uninstaller (by Erik Stam) – Installomator, but the opposite. Easily uninstall apps with recipes.
Jamf Setup Manager (by Jamf) – Enrollment progress tool.
JamfCheck (by Thijs Xhaflaire) - App that allows you to easily run a couple of checks for Jamf Pro, Jamf Connect and Jamf Protect.
Support App (by Root3) - Is a macOS menu bar app that can display all the things.
SchoolAssembly (by Anthony Darlow) – An App deployment/onboarding tool for macOS design for use Jamf School.
IBM Notifier (by IBM) – Tool to trigger interactive popups and notification banners to the end user.
Jamf Compliance Editor (by Jamf) – Tool to easily configure macOS Security Compliance Project baselines in Jamf.
Nudge (by Eric Gomez) – App that strongly encourages macOS updates.
Munki (By Walt Disney Animation Studios) - Munki is a set of tools that, used together with a webserver-based repository of packages and package metadata, can be used by macOS administrators to manage software installs (and in many cases removals) on macOS client machines.
Xcreds (by twocanoes) – An alternative to Jamf Connect.
Apperancy (by Mothers Ruin Software) – An app to inspect other apps.
There are many more tools to list (and most of people above have multiple tools that could be listed). Feel free to suggest others in the comments below!
Last but not least, I wanted to reference a couple conferences you can attend or podcasts you can listen to:
Jamf Nation User Conference (US)
Penn State University MacAdmins (US)
MacSysAdmin (Sweden, EU)
MacAdUK (UK)
Apple @ Work podcast by 9to5mac
Jamf after dark podcast by Jamf
MacAdmins postcast (by MacAdmins Foundation)
Did I forget something? Probably so! Please share in the comments below!
