This week I’ve been lucky enough to be asked by Jamf to present at the Australian/New Zealand roadshow, to demonstrate how we leverage Apple’s DEP and Jamf’s Jamf Pro to build our Macs at SEEK.
I’m super excited to present at my first roadshow tomorrow, in Auckland – and I am very much looking forward to being surrounded by kiwi accents for two days!
In my short presentation, I step through our deployment workflow types, our workflow requirements, and the tools and services used to build it.
In the meantime, here’s a brief summary of the requirements that I considered when designing a Mac build workflow for SEEK, and a link to the tools and services I used to bring it all together.
Workflow requirements
When designing our build workflow, we had to make sure that it covered the standard Mac MOE requirement of installing core applications and settings, as well as the following:
- A workflow that works whether it is being carried out by a deployment technician or by the primary user of the Mac
- We want the primary user of the Mac to be a local computer admin
- We want there to be a second admin computer account for the tech team, and for this account to have a unique password
- We need the computer to be FileVault encrypted, and for both accounts to be FileVault enabled
- We need our Macs to have a particular computer name
- A workflow that allows the end user to continue using the Mac throughout the build process
- We want to be able to inform the user, be it a tech or an end-user, of the progress of the build
- We want the ability to interact with them, to be able to gather information from them, if required
- We want the build workflow to begin as soon as the first user logs in to the Mac – right after the Apple Setup stage
- And finally, we want to keep track of Macs once they are built – we want to send a summary report to a private tech team Slack channel
Tools and Services
- Slack’s API (I provide an example of our Slack report here)
- And of course, a whole bunch of scripts and packages on our Jamf Pro server, made possible with the magic of Jamf Pro and DEP
I will share more content about this topic in the coming days/weeks, including the demo that I’m showing at the Roadshow and some extra code snippets that I didn’t have time to include in my allocated time, but if there’s anything you are particularly interested in, or if you have any questions, hit me up in the comments section below or message me on Twitter.