You know who you are. You’re the IT guru with an affinity for Macs, you know all about using a Mac, but just not necessarily enough to manage these things. Nevertheless, you know Macs so you get nominated as the IT guru in charge of finding a way to bring all of the Macs showing up in your enterprise into management. For security reasons, your business just can’t ignore these things any longer, especially since the CXO’s are the principle drivers of bringing Macs into the business.
So where do you start?
Leveraging LANDesk’s Management Suite, we will talk about how you can discover all of the machines on your network, including those Macs. We’ll discuss how you can subsequently get an agent installed on it, even if you don’t know of an admin account, so that you can gain the visibility needed of what is on that machine and what its use is.
Once under management, we’ll discuss how using LANDesk Management Suite you can treat your Mac just as any other device in your workflow. We’ll show how you can target a LDAP group or user to distribute software. We will walk through the ever-growing issue of patch management, including that of third party software. We will even discuss how you can patch some App Store content purchased with a VLK.
We will also illustrate how you can provide a self-service package to your end users so they can upgrade their operating system on their own. With Apple’s next generation operating system just around the corner, having a method in place to get people upgraded in a controlled, but non-destructive manner will score you a huge IT win and really show management you’re bringing the control to the chaos.
Bennett Norton has been building, deploying, supporting and working with systems management tools to manage heterogeneous networks since 2002. In late 2011, Bennett made the jump from utilizing systems management tools to creating systems management tools and is now the product manager at LANDesk Software, responsible for the LANDesk OS X product integration with LANDesk Management Suite and LANDesk Security Suite.
Steve Goodrich is the lead developer for the LANDesk OS X agent team. He has been writing software most days and many nights for the last 25 years.