App Installers - What’s New?

With the release of Jamf Pro 10.37 earlier this year, we introduced App Installers in a preview state for Jamf Cloud customers, providing a streamlined way to deploy apps not available from the Mac App Store and automatically keep them up-to-date.

As mentioned in the App Installers FAQ, we made the decision to release App Installers in a preview state so that we could gather as much feedback from customers as possible to help us refine the process and prioritize planned enhancements.

The feedback that we received from the community has been warmly received and we have been hard at work over the last few months to address some of the biggest gaps that you all helped us identify.

The App Installers enhancements that we are bringing to Jamf Cloud customers in 10.40 are focused on providing visibility to the status of App Installer deployments in your environments. Once you enable an App Installer deployment for a given software title, you will then be presented with the option to click on a ‘Deployment Status’ tab. From within this tab, you will be able to easily see how many qualified computers are within the smart group that has been scoped to this deployment and the current installation status of the latest version of that software title.

If there are machines that have had an install fail, such as if a computer had been offline for an extended period of time and had passed the maximum install retry limit, you can quickly identify those machines in the list and either select the ‘retry’ button for an individual computer or ‘retry all’ to restart the installation process on all machines that had failed.

Additionally, we are providing information on the management history of a given machine. To help identify when a particular App Installer initiated an InstallEnterpriseApplication command on a computer, the InstallEnterpriseApplication name was updated to include the software title name and version number (e.g. InstallEnterpriseApplication - Slack - 4.27.154). This will enable admins to more easily narrow down what installs are being triggered on their Mac and when.

Whilst we believe this additional visibility will be welcomed by Admins, we were also aware that the previous App Installers update process to applications running on the end user devices had some shortcomings. To address this we have been developing a new mechanism that will queue the installation on an end user machine and only perform the update to the application once it is no longer running. This mechanism will continue to be rolled out in more App Installer titles over the next month.

We are hard at work to make more software titles available in App Installers as well as adding heavily requested features such as the ability to publish a title to Self Service. Feature enhancements will continue to roll out in future releases of Jamf Pro.