Prompting
Some administrators may receive feedback from users who report PreBuilt App prompts occur too frequently or have been disruptive to their workday.
There are a few ways admins can improve this experience -
- We first recommend setting a PreBuilt Apps deployment schedule so users are only prompted at certain times of the day. With a deployment schedule, admins can control the days on/times at which users are prompted.
- Most customers have had the best experience by setting a deployment window for the end of the day (around 4/5pm, or whenever your end users generally finish up their workday). This way, users are only prompted to update/updates are only forcibly installed toward the end of the day (a less disruptive experience).
- We also suggest allowing PreBuilt Apps to run multiple days a week (ex: Monday-Friday). If the schedule is set to only allow deployments once or twice a week, users may be overwhelmed by many prompts on that day and apps will likely never reach their Enforcement Date.
- Changing the the cadence of prompts from 4 hours to 8 hours may also help improve the experience for end users reporting excessive prompts.
Note: New installations will not occur outside of your policy's set deployment schedule. If you'd like to allow new installations to be deployed outside of this schedule (as they will not interrupt your end users), we recommend creating a separate policy to initially install PreBuilt Apps without a deployment schedule. PreBuilt Apps updates should be deployed through another policy with a deployment schedule.
An example of a suggested schedule configuration is provided below.
Microsoft Office Apps
Microsoft Office updates are released about once a week (every 7 days). For this reason, some end users may feel overwhelmed by the frequent prompts they receive to update MS Office apps.
We often find that end users are having an unpleasant experience because admins have configured Microsoft Office Prebuilt Apps to 'Latest & Auto Update' & 'Enforce Updates' (forcibly install updates without giving users the option to defer) after 7 or more days.
With this setup, updates are never forcibly installed because they never reach their Enforcement Date - When a new update is released, the deferral count resets. Therefore, if an update has been deferred for 7 days, and another new update is released on that day, the deferral count resets to 0. This results in end users being continuously prompted for updates because there is always a Microsoft update available and it is never forcibly installed.
To resolve this and improve the end user experience, we suggest setting 'Enforce Update' to a value less than 7 days for Microsoft Apps in particular. This will ensure MS Office apps stay up to date, and that end users are not continuously prompted.
FAQs
PreBuilt Apps are deployed with an installation priority of 10.
PreBuilt Apps only checks for and installs apps at the System level. If an app has been installed at the User level, it will not be updated when deployed via PreBuilt Apps. Deploying a PreBuilt App that has already been installed at the User level will result in duplicate applications, one at the User level (original installation) and one at the System level (PreBuilt App installation).
If you are currently deploying certain applications via our Public Software Catalog and would like to start deploying them via PreBuilt Apps, you can simply remove the Public Software versions of the apps from your policies and replace them with Prebuilt App assignments.
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If any policy assigned to a device (including Flex Policies) has a PreBuilt Apps deployment schedule configured, that schedule becomes the effective schedule for all PreBuilt Apps on that device, regardless of which policy assigned each app.
For example: If a device is assigned to multiple policies and each policy deploys different PreBuilt Apps, but only one of those policies has a deployment schedule configured, that single schedule will control when all of the device’s PreBuilt Apps deploy.
When multiple policies assigned to a device each configure their own PreBuilt Apps schedule, the schedules conflict. The system may arbitrarily use any one of those schedules during execution, so administrators should avoid configuring more than one schedule for a given device. To ensure predictable behavior, configure only a single PreBuilt Apps schedule for any device across all of its assigned policies.
Release Notes
Relevant Release Notes can be found by viewing 'App Details' for each application in the Addigy interface.
MS Company Portal
Installation will be skipped if the Addigy Integration for Microsoft Conditional Access/Intune is enabled, as we manage Company Portal via another process in that case.
Microsoft OneNote 365
The stand-alone installer for OneNote, as distributed by Microsoft directly, does not include Microsoft AutoUpdate in the pkg. For all Microsoft Office apps except OneNote, the auto updater is included in the package by default. For this reason, the Microsoft Auto Updater is available as a standalone PreBuilt app so admins are able to deploy it alongside OneNote.
OneDrive
The standalone OneDrive pkg, as distributed by Microsoft, will fail to update OneDrive from the Mac App Store. If we detect an existing Mac App Store version installed, we skip trying to update it.
Note: OneDrive may crash when deployed to Virtual Machines.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
We configure PPPC and Service Management settings in the included profile for Defender but can not currently approve the network filter or configure any other settings via the PreBuilt Apps attached profile. The administrator will need to set any remaining configuration in a separate profile and deploy it alongside Defender.
FileMaker Pro 2024 & 2025
FileMaker Pro will only update an existing FileMaker Pro install with the same major version. It will not update older FMP Major versions to prevent crossing licenses tied to old versions.
Adobe Acrobat Reader
If we detect that the "Unified" version of Adobe Acrobat is installed, we will skip installing Reader as "Unified" Acrobat updates will uninstall Reader.
Adobe has consolidated its Acrobat product line into a single unified application, eliminating the standalone Acrobat Reader — features are now determined by the user's licensing credentials at sign-in. Users with a paid subscription get full Acrobat; everyone else gets Reader-level functionality. As a result, we are retiring the Acrobat Reader PreBuilt App and updating the Acrobat DC PreBuilt App.
Parallels Desktop
We highly recommend that only one version of Parallels Desktop (19, 20, 26, etc.) is included in a policy for Prebuilt Apps - The condition script is not looking at the version installed, just the name of the application in the applications folder. Because of this - if you have Parallels 19 installed, it could be overwritten by Parallels 20 (which is a different software), which may break the license.
Homebrew
Homebrew requires Xcode CLI tools, which we install if not already present.
Python
This Python framework is from Python.org. Multiple different Python versions can be installed on the same host, thus we split each new minor release (3.12, 3.13, 3.14, etc) into a separate PreBuilt App.
Docker
When setting up Docker Desktop, one user account on the computer must be chosen as the “installed user.” We use the console account that’s logged in most often for this setup.
Support App
We prevent end users from disabling the app via Service Management profile. The app runs in a demo mode by default but admins can deploy their own configuration profiles outside of PBA. https://github.com/root3nl/SupportApp
Anka
To fully install Anka silently, we agree to Anka’s EULA at install time.
Jabra Direct
While the main Jabra Direct app is a universal build, the pkg also contains a 2nd app for updating Jabra device firmware and that app is still Intel-only. On AppleSi hosts, we will install Rosetta2 if needed to accommodate that.
Sonos
Since this is an Intel-only app, we will install Rosetta2 on AppleSi hosts as part of the install, if not already installed.