With Mountain Lion Developer release, and most likely the finished release having all updates via the App store, how does ARD fit into the picture?

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Level 2

160 points

With Mountain Lion Developer release, and most likely the finished release having all updates via the App store, how does ARD fit into the picture?

The following question is based on what I have seen in some early reports of the Developer version of Mountain Lion.

Since the Developer Release of Mountain Lion, and the final version also I expect, having all updates being installed via the App Store by the user, how is a administrator to keep hundreds of systems current with all updates? The App Store requires, at least in its current version, a user to log in with their Apple Account ID and password even to do no cost updates. In an Enterprise operation I expect a number, maybe the majority of users will just not bother to do the updates.

Is there some way to use ARD to handle keeping Mountain Lion systems fully updated from an ARD Admin system? Is there a backdoor for updating systems?

Apple Remote Desktop 3

Posted on May 8, 2012 7:50 AM

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Answer 1

varjak paw

Level 10

170,200 points

May 8, 2012 8:56 AM in response to Joe Pyrdek

No one is going to be able to discuss how ARD might work with Mountain Lion since anyone running an ML system is under nondisclosure and cannot discuss it publicly. All anyone here can talk about is how ARD can (or cannot, as the case may be) be used to keep Lion systems updated.

At this point I don't see any easy option in ARD to run Mac App Store updates, but it might be possible to script that, though whether that could run in background, as OS updates can, or on a system without a user logged in I don't know. Someone else here may be able to offer insight. For enterprise-level management I think most people have more-or-less given up on ARD as their primary tool, though, and moved to one of the third-party solutions.

Regards.

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