Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Marilyn Halpin. She and her husband run mac-fusion, an Apple-Authorized Service Provider in Signal Hill, CA. As such, she knows all about Apple support in the realms of education and business.
Yesterday’s announcement of Lion and Lion Server being only available in the Mac App Store made me cringe. Not because I will no longer be able to sell it. Not because I will lose what tiny bit of profit there was on it. Not because I have a love of physical DVD media. Not because you have to be on Snow Leopard to have this option.[1. Yay! Let’s upgrade so we are eligible to upgrade!!] I cringe because of how this shift to the Mac App Store works in the corporate world. As of today there isn’t a great way to deploy apps that are available in the Mac or iOS App stores. If you have 50 users that need FileMaker Go I can’t just buy a volume license of it and push it to their iPhones and iPads. I can’t use one Apple ID to manage 50 computers and apps that are only available through the Mac App Store. While there are several work arounds, none of them are optimal:
- Have your users buy their own software and expense it. Of course, this means your business no longer owns this software as an asset. When the user leaves the software tied to their ID, the software leaves too. Not a big deal on a $30 app but what about $300 one?
- Have multiple Apple IDs to purchase all the copies you need — one ID for every 5 Macs you manage. This is OK in a small shop of 10 or so people but getting up to 25 or more and it will get out of hand quickly.
- Assign users a special asset ID email address that they use as their corporate Apple ID and supply users with iTunes gift cards- This gives you your assets back but your user is still responsible for purchasing and installing their own software.
Now let’s move onto the other issues in the “Mac App Store Only” world.
What about bandwidth? You pick your above solution of choice and give the “OK” to move forward on obtaining a newly blessed app for the company. Now you have 10, 20, 50+ people trying to download the app and for the next 3 days you have massive internet slowness. There’s no internal software update server, no “download once, install as many as needed” options.
What about man power? I can install 50 copies of Filemaker Pro, all serialized, personalized and with preferences set in about an hour without disturbing the users, they don’t even know I’ve done it. What happens when your IT person now has to touch each of those 50 computers? What happens if you let your staff do it? What are the chances that all 50 of those users are going to install it correctly and not have issues? The bigger questions is what are those users NOT doing while they play IT guy?
Let’s talk about something I touched on earlier, having to upgrade your Mac to Snow Leopard to be eligible for Lion. Currently if you have an early Intel box that shipped with Tiger you can buy the box set of Snow Leopard as a legit upgrade path (it costs more but you get updated iWork and iLife and don’t have to have Leopard). Under this MAS Only approach you have to upgrade your Mac to Snow Leopard to be eligible for Lion next month. What? Why go through all the growing pains of a new OS twice? Oh, that’s right, so I can have access to the MAS to have access to Lion. Now let’s go back to corporate, my clients have site licenses for OS X. I will say that OS upgrades are not as fast or hands off as deploying apps, but doing each one twice… Start above rant all over again and kick me in my shins please.
There are so many questions right now my little head can barely contain it. I would love to see them institute a VLA (Volume Licensing Agreement) Apple ID. This ID would allow you to purchase as many copies of an app that you need. I would also like the option to download the installer (ONCE) and deploy it like I normally do. Until they find some sort of option for this the words “Mac App Store Only” will continue to scare me.
Full disclosure: I work for an AASP and my day to day function at our company is outsourced Mac IT for small to mid sized business.