Here again your favorite Random Dude in ITNinja,

I got KACE Cloud and I thought that deploying apps would be pretty easy as in the SMA (how wrong was I). After some digging, I see that macOS limit A LOT of how .pkgs files can be deployed via MDM. Sooo.. I found the following:

1. Every .pkg MUST be signed by an Apple Developer certificate
2. Only one app can be installed by a .pkg, if a pkg contains other pkg files it WON'T do anything.

Now I also found a way to check if any of the previous rules are not followed by the PKG.

For testing, I downloaded the installer for Zoom, zoousIntstallerFull.pkg

To test #1, run "pkgutil --check-signature zoousIntstallerFull.pkg"

So it seems that it is correctly signed. 

To test #2, after downloading the pkg from your terminal run "tar xf zoomusInstallerFull.pkg -C /your/preferred/location/" 

After that, you will get something like these...

Lastly, you just need to right-click on the pkg file and then click on "Show Package Contents"

And this is what I found

Option 3? Ignore everything I just said and use this app.

With this in mind, then this explains why I can't deploy Zoom via KACE Cloud (at least as of today)... I assume if in the future, they add the capability to deploy pkgs from the KACE Cloud agent then this should not be a problem anymore. In the meantime, back to the SMA.

I hope this information is helpful to others.

Thanks for reading!

See you in my next post!