Typical number of packages and policies managed?

[genem]

For organizations of 10,000 Mac devices, typically how many policies and packages are created in a year? By packages, I mean new, upgrades, or patches.

Also do you find they go up when you have multiple departments that may require different applications or policies?

[bpavlov]

I don't think number of devices will play into it as much as the organization structure will. For example, how you're scoping and dividing up those computers will make a difference. How many apps will you be supporting? What scenarios will you want to fill in that Casper does not take into account which might result in creating extra policies to create a little extra customization? Do the users have admin rights? And so on.

[genem]

Thanks for the reply, I am in the very early stages of planning, so I don't have solid numbers. As for apps, its hard to tell how many will be natively supported in the Mac App Store, and how many we will repackage and put in Casper (including in-house). Users will likely be admins. There will be several physical locations, and logical departments.

I guess I am just looking for a ballpark, am I managing 10 apps, or 100. Am I managing 20 policies or 200?

[swapple]

I am wondering the same thing. We don't lock our machines down too far but we have a feature rich self service so that has resulted in 30-40 policies and still growing as we are still a new install. We just have 10 apps in but are still adding those in.

When I did a software inventory of our users machines, I am not seeing a large variety of apps, most people focus with just a few. So our app catalog won't be too robust until the need comes up.

[bofh]

We have around 280 policies. 100 Packages are manged with Autopkg (results in 200 Policies; Update Install). around 50 Policies with Software which need licenses etc.

With around 100 Clients.

As we serve the local Universities, there's a lot research sectors, resulting in a shitload of different software.

[Look]

We have around 1500 clients and have 175 policies, however there was about 250 before cleaning out last years so we are adding or removing about 75 a year.
We have about 600 packages however we probably create about 200 a year (we are doing semi automated updates so more than half of these a related to that and the other half to creating an SOE at the start of the year).
We are a University so don't tend to update packages during semester except those that represent a security risk, but we also have some pretty complex SOE's for areas with multiple different classes.
We also have about 130 scripts of which we are creating or changing probably a couple a week.
Quite a lot of content is now delivered by Self Service so a fair amount of all this relates to that.
I don't really think it matters how many machines, I can't see our setup being much different if there were 10,000 machines and if we didn't have Macs across 5 or 6 different groups it could potentially be much simpler, we have 10 different Configurations this year (down from about 15 last year with a big normalisation push).
We have two people working on this and that leaves a healthy amount of time for development work now that we are nice and familiar with the setup and everything is nice and stable.

[Chris_Hafner]

Agreed, this is certainly going to vary depending on environment. For example, a place that's automated something like, printer installation won't bother having a metric ton (or tonne for my friends across the pond) of SS policies to install them. That said, our numbers for a small educational environment of >800 continuous users are about 180 policies and a few hundred packages (or .DMGs) a year. Let's not forget that things like flash accounts for something like 10% of that number. I could automate that (but I don't trust Adobe so...) and then I wouldn't be packaging that at all.