Back in 2019, IBM announced to the world their ‘Mac@IBM’ programme, complete with eye-watering savings that they were making by switching to Mac. Included in their programme was some cool on-boarding software that would present the user with an informative splash screen whilst a Mac initially set itself up, keeping them updated about the progress of the installation of all of the apps and settings. IBM also kindly open-sourced their provisioning workflow, which then spawned a raft of similar solutions: we got this working via Jamf Connect on our school’s Macs with Jamf Pro, but it was set up for us by an external support company and I never could quite figure out how it worked to be able to troubleshoot it or update the settings.
In 2022 we made the jump to Jamf School for our iPads, and then in 2023 for our Macs. This bought a lot of simplicity to our enrolment workflow but also meant that we no longer could have a cool notification splash screen as part of the process. It wasn’t the end of the world, as all of the required apps and settings would just quietly install on the login screen of a freshly enrolled machine, but there was no way of knowing how the installation was progressing or when it was finished.
Enter Jamf Setup Manager.
This had been floating around in private beta since JNUC in 2023, but wonderfully made its official debut towards the end of 2024. It still remained a little fiddly thing to get working on Jamf School, until an update to Jamf School dropped just before Christmas that enabled the ability for a select few packages and profiles to be installed on a Mac as part of the enrolment process. Plus, iMazing Profile Editor have also added a preference manifest for Jamf Setup Manager, meaning that it’s now easy to create and edit the required configuration file in a lovely GUI rather than hacking away in an XML file. With all of these pieces of the puzzle in place, I gave it a go and was able to get it working to my satisfaction!
So, what does Jamf Setup Manager do?
Once it’s been installed, along with the corresponding configuration file, it launches during enrolment and informs the user about the progress of any installations. Here are the main moving parts:
- All of the text and images for the splash screen are customisable within the configuration profile. Comprehensive documentation about the structure and contents of the file is available.
- Each installable item is called an ‘action’. These have a label (i.e. the name of the app being installed) and an icon. The URL of the image can either be locally on the machine or hosted on the Internet. I have discovered that a right click on the app icon in Jamf School provides a fully-functioning web location that can be used for this.
- One of the possible actions to run is a shell command and its accompanying arguments. This can be used to replace any onboarding scripts that you might normally run.
- There is also a cute feature with icons, in that you can leverage Apple’s SF Symbols to create an icon for an action, e.g.
symbol:clockfor a shell command to set the default time zone. - To actually install apps, there are two mechanisms:
- The first one relies on Jamf School to do its thing and install the apps as normal, either using VPP Mac App Store apps or via App Installers. Jamf Setup Manager handles this with a ‘watch path’, where it will keep monitoring a specific directory (usually the /Applications folder) until the app appears before moving onto the next action. This can, however, take quite some time as Jamf Setup Manager has no way of telling Jamf School which order to install the apps in and so just has to sit around until the specified app has been installed.
- To counter this, Jamf Setup Manager can also make use of second method, specifically Installomator ‘labels’. Installomator is an epic script for installing applications, through specific instructions about how to fetch, download and install the correct package for any given app. This whole script is built into Jamf Setup Manager, so you just have to specify which app to install and it will do the rest. There is handy list of possible apps on GitHub, which just have to be specified in the configuration profile. The app can still be updated using App Installers in Jamf School, but using Installomator for the initial installation adds a lot more control to the onboarding workflow.
Once it’s all configured properly, Jamf Setup Manager does work like a dream. Testing can be a little time consuming, as the Mac has to be wiped in order to be set up again, but this is a quicker process now thanks to ‘Erase All Contents and Settings’.
I would love it if Jamf were to build this tool completely into Jamf School so that it was just a tickbox in the settings to activate, perhaps with the ability to choose apps from those already in Jamf School. But for now, it’s definitely a big step forwards in making Jamf School an increasingly viable MDM option for the Mac in education.
Primary ICT 