Cabela’s

By their boot straps

From its start at Dick and Mary Cabela’s kitchen table in 1961, through its 2004 debut on the New York Stock Exchange, and continuing today, Cabela’s is the world’s foremost outfitter of fishing, hunting, and outdoor gear. They have also always been a forward thinking “up by your boot straps” kind of company. This is also true of their IT department.

Joshua Kaiser, a Senior Graphic Systems Administrator at the Cabela’s headquarters in Sidney, Nebraska, says, “We like to do some things ourselves. If there’s something our IT department can do on their own, or be trained to do, it’s really beneficial for us.”

Before deploying Jamf Pro, Cabela’s used a popular remote desktop solution combined with an open source tool. Even when used together they were limited and unreliable. Cabela’s decided to use Jamf Pro because it was a complete desktop management tool and its flexibility fit their work style.

Handling internal policies and regulations

“In our environment, we like to write custom scripts for client workstations. Some run on a regular basis and some are user activated. What really impresses me about Jamf Pro is its policies functionality,” said Joshua. “My scripts are centralized now. We can automatically have Macs check in with the JSS to run whatever scripts are needed. I can also associate policies with scripts and do virtually anything from the Mac OS X command line. It’s really flexible.”

Responding to external compliance requests

When a compliance audit occurs, it’s advantageous to respond quickly and accurately. When a software vendor contacted Cabela’s, they relied on Jamf Pro to make this audit process as painless as possible.

As Joshua explained, “In the past, we never had an efficient way to do inventory. When we received a compliance request from our vendor, we were relieved to have Jamf Pro's Recon application. The vendor asked us to provide reports showing where all of their products were installed. Using our old approach, at best we would have had single reports from individual machines and we would have experienced periodic failures trying to get them. Using Jamf Recon, we reduced what would have been two weeks worth of work to two days and it was largely automated. We responded to the vendor with confidence—it was a huge success.”