Newsletter Archive

Happy New Year! We're back at it post MacWorld and looking forward to another great year. We had the good fortune of seeing a number of old friends, as well new ones, while attending Macworld. There was much to see, and we appreciate everyone who took the time to come by and see us. Special thanks goes to those who turned out for our National User Group, high above the fray of the San Francisco streets, where we previewed our pending update to Composer.

Composer 7 lets users point-and-click their way through the package creation process. In doing so, it creates software and/or file installation packages for network deployment quickly and easily, creating packages in either .pkg or .dmg formats. Creating packages that are tailored to end-user configurations allows IT administration to save time and resources as well as network bandwidth, since only the required data is being distributed.

Current Composer users can expect an email with upgrade instructions by the end of the month.

Composer 7 sports a new interface and a number of new features:

"Drag-and-drop" package building
Simply drag the software components and/or files to be distributed onto the Composer application window to create preconfigured software or file packages quickly and easily.

Built-in QuickView file viewer
Easily see critical information about files and folders without having to locate them in the OS X Finder.

"Developer Tools" independent
Composer 7 no longer requires the pre-installation of Apple's Developer Tools to create packages.

Restore deleted files
Administrators can edit and test packages with ease, safe in the knowledge that they can recreate the package's previous state with Composer's 'Undelete' feature.

Download Diffs
Composer allows users to quickly compare contents from multiple packages. They can get the latest .composer files for fast creation of current packages using the Prebuilt option.

Package Editor
Composer's Package Editor adds a range of productivity features, including the ability to manage pre-flights and post-flights, easy identification of new, modified or deleted files, and diff file creation.

Have you ever wondered how the JSS handles time sensitive policies and logging for clients located in different time zones?

Let's say we have a JSS that is located in Minneapolis (CST). We have users in Los Angeles (PST) and New York (EST). We have a policy in place to install software updates between 1:00 am and 3:00 am. The JSS will handle everything by the time zone the client machine is located in. If it is midnight in Minneapolis, the time in New York is 1:00 AM EST so the policy will start executing in New York. The client machines in LA will start executing the policy at 1:00 AM PST in LA which would be 3:00 AM CST in Minneapolis.

This functionality is built to make it easy for a system administrator to have one set of policies that can be enforced based on the location of the managed client. As an additional note, the logs on the JSS will always depict the time of the server that the JSS is running on.

Join our Support Mailing List! The lists often contain discussions regarding problems encountered by other Casper administrators and their resolutions. This free service is available to customers and non-customers via subscription and includes both the Casper Suite and Composer mailing lists.