11 Dec Dec 2025 – MacAdmins Meeting

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December 17th, 2025 – University of Utah, MacAdmins Meeting

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The University of Utah MacAdmins Meeting is held virtually monthly on the 3rd Wednesday of each month at 11 AM Mountain Time. Presentations cover Apple technology and integration in a heterogeneous university enterprise environment. This month’s meeting will be held on Wed, December 17th, 2025, at 11 AM MT, and we will provide live broadcasts and archives that will be made available 2-3 days after the meeting.

JNUC 2025 Overview & Notables – Amelia Oriti, Jamf

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This session offers a focused, comprehensive review of the most significant product announcements and emerging trends shaping the work of Apple administrators. It highlights the continued evolution of Declarative Device Management (DDM) and Jamf Blueprints—now firmly established as the primary method for applying and maintaining device settings and policies, including the latest passcode requirements and software update controls.

Attendees will also get an in-depth look at the enhanced Platform SSO experience in macOS 26 Tahoe, featuring streamlined setup processes and support for NFC-enabled authentication, allowing users to sign in using an Apple Watch or iPhone.

The presentation showcases major advancements to the AI Assistant, particularly its new Explain and Search capabilities. These tools can break down complex scripts, generate clear documentation, conduct inventory analysis through natural-language queries, and automatically identify configuration conflicts between new Blueprints and existing deployments.

Additional focus is given to the unified Jamf Platform APIs, designed to provide a consistent development model across all Jamf products. The session concludes with a look at the rapidly growing adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for Jamf Pro, enabling organizations to manage environments with greater precision, repeatability, and oversight.

About Amelia Oriti

Amelia Oriti is a Sales Engineer at Jamf with approximately four years of experience, previously working at Apple Retail. She is based in Akron, Ohio, and is an alumnus of Ohio University. Outside of her professional life, Amelia is passionate about photography, which she pursues alongside or in conjunction with her interest in technology.

Modern VM Management on macOS: Secure and Easy Access to Windows Apps by Luba Kulakova, Parallels

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Virtual machines have become a standard part of the macOS toolkit in organizations and on university campuses. But when VMs operate outside IT oversight, they introduce hidden risks — from circumventing macOS security controls to providing unsupervised access to institutional resources.

Virtualization today can be far more than an ad-hoc workaround. It can serve as a fully governed, secure, and integrated workspace on the Mac.

This session explores how Parallels Desktop Enterprise gives IT teams end-to-end control over the VM lifecycle while still enabling employees and students to use the Windows applications essential to their work. We’ll walk through how to manage access to virtualization, define how VMs interact with macOS, and enforce security and compliance within the Windows environment itself.

If your institution depends on Windows software or wants to eliminate the risks of unmanaged VMs, join us to learn how to bring consistency, compliance, and strong security to macOS virtualization across your organization.

About Luba Kulakova

Luba leads the B2B segment for Parallels Desktop. She works closely with Mac admins in corporate and educational sectors to understand their challenges and improve VM management at scale. With over seven years of experience in managing virtualization products, Luba combines her PM expertise with a master’s degree in Information Security.

The Software Lifecycle Whisperer – How Installomator Tames Install-Update-Automate Chaos by Richard Glaser, Univ of Utah

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This presentation explores how the Marriott Library at the University of Utah transformed macOS software deployment and maintenance by automating the entire software lifecycle—installing, updating, and managing applications at scale. The talk begins with an overview of the library’s diverse, high-volume technology environment, supporting thousands of Macs, Windows devices, and iPads. It outlines the operational challenges brought on by COVID-19, including rapid scaling of student-checkout devices, expanding software needs, remote support, and the limitations of traditional packaging workflows.

Before adopting Installomator, the team relied on manual packaging, repackaging Mac App Store and commercial apps, patch management, API automation (python-jamf and jctl), and custom scripts to manage software consistently across platforms. These processes, while powerful, created bottlenecks—particularly when dealing with non-standard installers, licensing requirements, and time-sensitive updates. A detailed “repackage decision flow” demonstrates when and why certain apps still require custom packaging versus automation.

The core of the presentation focuses on Installomator—an open-source, label-driven installer engine that downloads, verifies, and installs macOS applications directly from vendors. The session highlights its strengths: simplified infrastructure, reduced technical debt, rapid deployment, Self Service integration, compatibility with multiple MDMs, and support for distributed fleets. It also clearly outlines where Installomator is not appropriate, such as version-locked environments, authenticated downloads, licensing-restricted software, or bandwidth-limited networks.

Attendees are walked through Installomator’s flow logic, configuration variables (debug modes, notifications, DND settings, ownership rules), and real examples of Jamf Pro and Intune setup workflows. The talk concludes with practical guidance for mixing tools—Installomator, patch management, AutoPKG, Title Editor, and manual workflows—to create a flexible software lifecycle strategy that meets varying application requirements.

Open Discussion

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Questions, comments, problems, and fixes.

Directions

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This meeting will not be held in person but virtually via Zoom video communications architecture.

With Zoom, we will implement the following security best practices:

• Require a Password to Join This meeting will require a password to join. Information will be emailed via a campus internal list, but if you are external and want to attend the meeting, please use the Contact Us form to receive details. Otherwise, the archive of the meeting will be available 2-3 days after the live meeting.

• Waiting Room When joining the meeting, you will be placed in the Waiting Room by default, and the hosts will give you access to the live meeting.

• Miscellaneous We will also implement other settings and safeguards to secure the meeting.

** Archived Presentation(s)**

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• Archives of the presentations will be available on this web page.