We researched and looked at demos of various products and determined that Parallels Mac Management for SCCM was the best fit and its functionality would enable our IT department to make large improvements in managing the Mac environment. No customizations required would allow a simplified upgrading process. Upgradeable - Preferred if the solution meets business needs out of the box.Maintainability - The system was able to run on existing SCCM components in our infrastructure.Scalability - Hosting all components on virtual servers would allow for growth and performance tuning as required.If the firewall is enabled in macOS, a message is displayed asking you if pma_agent.app should be allowed to accept incoming connections.Non-domain-joined Mac clients will require a local admin account. The solution did not need to manage iPhones & iPads only Mac OS X 10.7 and newer.The solution had to effectively integrate with our existing SCCM infrastructure.Ability to enable and manage Mac FileVault 2 encryption.PKI security for Mac clients for encrypted communications between client and SCCM server.Common reporting and compliance reports between Mac and Windows.Central security patch deployment and reporting for Mac.Single pane of glass for compliance, reporting, & security.The capability to have a holistic view on software licensing.Automation of software and OS configuration and security configuration.Driving down IT operating costs by reducing duplicate work, incident resolution time, service request completion time, accurate reporting for hardware, and software licenses to make educated business decisions.This capability if implemented would provide a single pane of glass for managing both Apple products and Windows-based computers in our environment. There was no automated asset management solution for these devices, which means that we had to rely on manual efforts for purchasing decisions and future planning. This made it very difficult to maintain standard configuration and added additional time and costs in supporting these devices. All work such as software installs, security updates, OS installs, and configuration, remote troubleshooting, security configurations were done manually by technicians. We had no solution to centrally manage Apple devices within our environment. Is it possible to have a single pane of glass for all your desktops? Can you have the same feature set of management tools that ConfigMgr gives you for Windows desktops but for Macs too? I worked through the process described below to come up with something that does exactly that. What if you could use just ConfigMgr for management of both? Things would be so much easier. The other state organizations might be in is that they have one tool to manage Windows desktops and a second tool to manage Mac desktops. In today’s world of vulnerabilities and ransomware, it can be difficult to ensure these Macs are fully patched and compliant with company security policies. Most haven’t been able to fully manage them with a central tool and instead have to dedicate people to visit each Mac as issues arise. A large percentage are using ConfigMgr to manage Windows desktops but the Mac desktops have always been a management problem. Many organizations have a mix of Windows and Mac desktops. I’m sure, however, that managing Macs in Windows environments has come a long way in the last few years with all the changes and improvements in Windows Intune and the latest version of System Center Configuration Manager, so let’s now see what we all can learn from Andrew as he explains how he’s been using ConfigMgr together with a third-party solution for managing Macs in his university environment. The book (available as a free ebook you can download here in PDF, Mobi, or ePub format) included a sample walkthrough of a scenario that involved deploying Adobe Reader to a Mac computer running Mac Book Pro with OS X Mountain Lion 10.8, and it was quite an illuminating experience to learn what was involved in such a deployment scenario. Although I don’t manage Macs myself, I did work together a few years ago with four System Center experts at Microsoft (Rushi Faldu, Manoj Kumar Pal, Andre Della Monica, and Kaushal Pandey) on a book that included a section that demonstrated how to use System Center 2012 R2 to create a workflow for application deployment on Mac clients. But can it manage Macs, too? That’s the question I put to my colleague Andrew Perchaluk, who is an Associate Infrastructure Solution Architect at the University of Manitoba right here where I live in Winnipeg, Canada. System Center Configuration Manager, better known simply as ConfigMgr, has long been the centerpiece of Microsoft’s solution for managing Windows computers.
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