Setup Manager 1.3
We have released Setup Manager 1.3 today. You can see the release notes and download the pkg installer here.
Most of the changes to Setup Manager in the update do not change the workflow directly. The focus for this update was to improve logging and information provided for trouble-shooting.
With the 1.3 update, Setup Manager provides richer logging information. You will find some entries in the Setup Manager log that were not initiated by the Setup Manager workflow, but are still very relevant to troubleshooting the enrollment workflow. You can see all installation packages that are installed during the enrollment, as well as network changes. This allows an admin to see when managed App Store installations or other installations initiated from the MDM or Jamf App Installers are happening in the enrollment workflow.
These can be very helpful to determine what might be delaying or interrupting certain other installations.
When we started building the “enrollment tool we wanted to use ourselves” more than two years ago, we chose to build a full application, rather than a script-based solution which remote controls some interface. One of the immediate benefits is that we could make the user interface richer and more specialized. Localizing the app into different languages was easier, too. Setup Manager adds Polish localization, bringing the total number of languages to ten!
(We use the help of volunteers from the community to localize to other languages, if you want to help localize Setup Manager into your language, please contact me.)
There was another goal, which took a bit longer to realize.
Swift apps allow us to dive deeper into the capabilities and information available in the operating system. A full blown app is also more capable at analyzing and displaying multiple sources of information at the same time. For example, Setup Manager will display a big warning when the battery level drops below a critical threshold.
These kinds of workflows and user interfaces would be nearly impossible or, at the very least, extremely complex to build and maintain with shell scripts. In this case, Setup Manager is monitoring and parsing other log files and summarizing them down to some important events in the background, while it is working through its main purpose of running through the action list from the profile.
This feature will not be seen by most users or even techs who are sitting in front of the Mac, waiting for the base installation to finish. But when you are trouble shooting problems during your enrollment workflow, these extra log entries can be very insightful. Even during testing, it unveiled some surprises in our testing environments.
We hope you like the new features. But, we are also not done yet and have plenty more ideas planned for Setup Manager!
utiluti 1.2
Since we are talking updates, I have also released an update to my CLI tool to set default apps for urls and file types (uniform type identifiers/UTI). utiluti
1.2 adds a manage
verb which can read a list of default app assignments from plist files or a configuration profile. You can see the documentation for the new manage
verb here and download the latest pkg installer here.
This allows you to define lists of default apps and push them with your device management system. Then you can run utiluti from a script in the same management system. This should greatly simplify managing default apps.
Note, that while you can set the default browser with utiluti
, whether you are using the manage
option or not, the system will prompt the user to confirm the new default browser. For this use case, you will want to put the utiluti
command in a context where the user is prepared and ready for that extra dialog (such as a Self Service app). There are other tools, such as Graham Gilbert’s make-default
CLI tool, which bypass the system dialog. In my experience, tools like this work well in fairly clean setup and require a logout or reboot after the change. This might fit your workflow, but you need to test.
I hope utiluti
will find a place in your MacAdmin’s toolbox!