Hello everyone-
First of all, thanks to everyone for the feature requests, both on this list and in person over the last 7 years. Almost every feature that we have comes from requests from our community. Thank you all for helping us make our products better.
Below are some quick responses to some of the items that have come through in the last month. Please feel free to respond on or off the list.
Granular Access to configurations
We've been evaluating how to best implement the idea of Scope into the Casper Suite for quite some time. Scope can mean many different things to people depending on the size and politics of their organization. I think that we have finally come up with a way that would allow us to implement this and make it useful for almost all of our clients. I don't have any timeframes to share about any of this at the moment, but please know that we are actively working towards a solution for this.
Custom SSH Ports
This can actually be accomplished in the current release. Just like you would edit the "/etc/sshd_config" file on the client computers, you can set the default port for SSH in your "/etc/ssh_config" file on the computer that you are running Casper Remote on. Nowhere is port 22 hardcoded into the Casper Suite. We'll update our documentation to reflect this information.
Email to all members of a Computer Group with custom Reply to address
This is a feature request that has been around for a while (Sean G... you were first!). We will look at this for an upcoming release.
Scripts in database vs Distribution Point
I believe that when we released version 5.0, we migrated the contents of the printer PPD files from Distribution Points to being stored in the JSS. We were very close to doing the same with scripts, but there was one item that prevented us from doing this. At that time, we had a number of clients who ran compiled applications/AppleScripts through the scripting framework. I'm wondering how many people currently do that? Also, the point that Bill made about standard AppleScripts is a valid concern. We might be able to find a hybrid solution that stores scripts in the database if possible, and the rest on distribution points.
This would allow normal shell scripts to be edited in the JSS and/or Casper Admin. We could easily provide some very basic syntax checking to Casper Admin (just like we do in Composer), but the JSS would be much more complicated.
man pages for jamf binary/jssutil
We've shied away from man pages in the past only because of the need to distribute them in addition to the jamf binary. If we implemented the "help" verb for the jssutil binary, would that meet the needs of everyone?
Better "plist" editing in the JSS for Managed Preferences
This is one that we've considered as well. I think that much of the work that went into the internals of 7.2 got us much closer to being able to provide an interface like this. We'll look at the feasibility of doing this, as I, too, would like this interface for Dictionaries and Arrays to be much better.
Nested Smart Configurations
I know that there are a number of places that this feature would save people quite a bit of time. Sean - in your situation, would the ability to swap packages based on the processor type give you the ability to accomplish this task without duplicating base configurations? Regardless, we will take a look at what it will take for us to do this on our end.
thanks again!
zach