It was our privilege to be contacted by Bizappcenter to take part in a demo of their ‘Business App Store‘ solution. They have been active on the Simian mailing list for some time, and have a product to help the adoption of the technologies pioneered by Greg Neagle of Disney Animation Studios (Munki) and the Google Mac Operations Team. Our experience with the product is as follows.

To start, we were given admin logins to our portal. The instructions guide you through getting started with a normal software patch management workflow, although certain setup steps need to be taken into account. First is that you must add users and groups manually, there are no hooks for LDAP or Active Directory at present (although those are in the road map for the future). Admins can enter the serial number of each users computer, which allows a package to be generated with the proper certificates. Then invitations can be sent to users, who must install the client software that manages the apps specified by the admin from that point forward.

Sample applications are already loaded into the ‘App Catalog’, which can be configured to be installed for a group or a specific user. Uploading a drag-and-drop app in a zip archive worked without a hitch, as did uninstallation. End users can log into the web interface with the credentials emailed to them as part of the invitation, and can even ‘approve’ optional apps to become managed installs. This is a significant twist on the features offered by the rest of the web interfaces built on top of Munki, and more features (including cross-platform support) are supposedly planned.

If you’d like to discuss Mac application and patch management options, including options such as BizAppCenter for providing a custom app store for your organization, please contact sales@318.com