Jamf App Catalog in the onboarding workflow

[nlecchi]

It would be very useful have a way to start the Jamf App Catalog installations during Single Touch Enrollment, before handing the Mac over to the end user. I think this depends on App Catalog more than the Setup manager. But may be we ca found a solution toghether. 🤞🏻

[nlecchi]

Can using watchPath be a solution?

[scriptingosx]

Jamf App Catalog apps use the InstallEnterpriseApplication MDM command and they happen when they happen, Setup Manager (or any other local process) cannot influence that. Usually the apps from the Mac App Store and the Jamf App Catalog happen fairly soon after enrollment, but we don't know the order. If there are big apps that are installed immediately )(Xcode, Adobe or Microsoft Suite) they can delay all the other apps quite significantly.

The watchPath action exists so you can get some status of these installations. It simply watches a file path e.g. /Applications/Xcode.app and waits until an app exists there. Since there are situations where this might not happen in a reasonable amount of time, the watchPath has a timeout. Default is 600 seconds (10 minutes) but for larger apps in poor network conditions you might want to set that higher. You also want to order your watchPath actions so that the larger apps are first.

Another solution is to use policies or Installomator for the initial installation in Setup Manager, these can be initiated at a given time, and we have a bit more control and status updates. After enrollment, you can then use the Jamf App Catalog for managing the updates of that app.

I would recommend joining the #jamf-setup-manager channel in the Mac Admins Slack (free signup at https://macadmins.org ) where there are several people who are successfully using Setup Manager ready to help with questions and problems.