Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-08-21

Welcome back! I get the impression I was the only one to take a while off this summer. So many post to sort through and link to…

I will be presenting at Virtual JNUC2020 this year. My session is “Scripting Jamf: Best Practices” (JNUC307) and is scheduled for Oct 1 at 11am CT (18:00 Central European time). The entire session schedule can be reviewed on their site and you can still register for free!

I am also preparing something for the MacSysAdmin Online. This will be a free online event this year where they will publish some of the best presentations from previous years and new content as well. You can support the team by buying the MacSysAdmin Online T-Shirt, which will also enroll you in an exclusive giveaway raffle.

If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

News and Opinion

macOS 11 Big Sur and iOS 14

macOS Catalina 10.15 and iOS 13 Updates

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • William Smith: “Small undocumented change with Policies in Jamf Pro 10.22 that I didn’t learn about until today: New policies no longer automatically include the Restart payload.”
  • Victor (groob): “Instead of asking ”experts“ for how you’d go about doing something, tell them what you tried, and ask why it’s not working.”
  • Anthony Reimer: “Intriguing. On the new 27-inch iMac, you can not customize the 256 GB of storage on the base model. You must move up to the middle model to get 512GB or more of storage.”
  • Victor (groob): “Four betas. Four subtle ways Apple broke a core workflow in MDM zero touch provisioning. All undocumented.”
  • Graham Pugh: “Jamf Self Service policies will not run on macOS 10.12 Sierra on Jamf Pro versions 10.22 and above. Jamf will not fix this as they drop support for Sierra in the next release.”
  • Anthony Reimer: “I’ve updated my Mac Obsolescence chart with the new iMac (hopefully making an appearance in a home near me). obsolescence.jazzace.ca”
  • Per Olofsson: “Companion niche tip: creating a sparsebundle from a folder and then converting it to a compressed read only dmg is multithreaded and faster than creating the dmg directly. In my testing the resulting dmg will also be smaller.”
  • Neil Martin: “TIL in profilecreator if you long-click the export button, you can export your payloads as MCX-style plists – handy!”
  • Erik Schwiebert: “Two month alert! Microsoft support for Office 2016 for the Mac ends on October 13, 2020”

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Updates and Releases

To Watch

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

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Published by

ab

Mac Admin, Consultant, and Author