Apple products seemingly are not designed with enterprise IT
in mind. They do not facilitate centralized management natively, and it’s a pain
point for many IT shops. Never-the-less, companies are still being infiltrated
with these devices as bring-your-own-device (BYOD) concepts gain ground.
I came across a solution for this problem in one of the last
places I expected. I was doing an on-site interview at Google. Over lunch, one
of the employees there mentioned that they developed a product similar to SCCM,
but to use with Mac OS X devices. Furthermore, this software is freely available in their
code library! How about that? An enterprise level solution for managing software on Apple
devices, developed by one of the largest and most innovative companies in the
world, it’s available for free, and it’s open source so you can make
modifications to it if you want/need to!
According to the Google Code page, Simian can:
- Deploy new or updated software by targeting a single
Mac or tens of thousands.
- Deploy updates whether the Mac is on an internal
network/VPN or not.
- Force unattended/background installation of some
packages, while allowing others to be optional.
- Forcefully deploy security patches and reboot Macs
after a given date, with varying levels of warning notifications.
- Tightly manage Apple Software Update catalogs and
update release, or let updates auto-promote automatically.
- Dynamically target clients based on user, hostname, OS
version, group (tag), and more.
- Obtain reports on all of this and the fleet overall.
If this is something that you are interested in, you can
check out this product at http://code.google.com/p/simian/
