Using the ARD Task Server Effectively

[ingenious7]

Hey,

This may be an ambitious task, but we want to be able to easily deploy all of our software to our Mac OS X clients using ARD 3. Ideally it would be nice to be able to do it in a similar fashion to Microsoft’s SCCM.

So far we can manually start an install task for a computer list and have it run on the Task Server but I want to take it one step further:

Ideally we would have some sort of Automator/Apple Script workflow set up that could search a specified Computer List in ARD, tell us what the Installed Packages are and if it is missing for example Office 2008 to install it. If there are already the appropriate receipts for Office 2008 don’t install it.

This workflow could then be set as a Scheduled Task to run whenever, and would ensure that when we re-image any computer we can be confident it will get the appropriate software.

I was REALLY REALLY REALLY hoping that somebody out there has the knowledge to have done this, or at least has the Apple Scripts to shared so I can do it. It would be much appreciated. I really hope that ARD 4 is much more deployment friendly to a large scale Mac network!

[macinandy]

It sounds like you are trying to get ARD to do something that projects like Puppet or Radmind already do. Have you looked into those?

Cheers

[ingenious7]

Thanks for that. Radmind looks very good. I am going to start looking at that to automatically deploy software. Seems like a project with a lot of potential. I still pray that Apple may integrate better deployment features for large scale Mac setups into any ARD 4 version that may arise in the future!

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