We are opening up a beta program for a product built specifically for this LaunchPad community!
The Rocketman Command Center is a swiss army knife for Jamf Admins with a variety of useful tools that helps take Jamf Pro to the next level.
The challenges of Bash Scripts
So why are we creating a new application? Since the beginning of Rocketman one of our biggest challenges has been managing shell scripts, and there's a couple reasons for this:
First off, although shell is powerful OS level code, it has its limitations. It's not great at parsing data or doing complex calculations. On top of this, it doesn't support libraries, and uses monolithic code, so our scripts are often thousands of lines of code, which becomes quite cumbersome to edit.
Second, shell scripts are deployed in uncompiled code to the user's computer, which isn't great from a security perspective, but it also means you're dependent on the version of bash or zsh on that computer, which changes with each OS version.
Third, updating scripts in Jamf Pro is very cumbersome, especially when working with multiple servers. Updating a script is literally copying and pasting code, and if you had hardcoded any changes into that script, those changes are gone as soon as you update it. And since shell scripts don't support libraries, if there's a specific function that needs to be updated for any reason, you have to painstakingly update that across all of your scripts. Because of this, many Jamf admins don't update their scripts unless something breaks.
Lastly, there is a lack of industry expertise with bash and zsh. Being a Jamf admin requires us to not only have a high level of understanding of the Apple operating system and a variety of IT software, but it also requires us to be good at customer service. But let's face it, most of us are not developers, and many of the difficult challenges we face with shell scripts are easy for a seasoned developer to tackle.
Our Solution: The Rocketman Command Center
To address all of these challenges, we built the Rocketman Command Center, which is a series of tools that you can deploy to your Mac computers. We essentially built an application that allows us to do all the complex things we were doing through shell scripts, eliminating all the challenges we were facing.
We've been using this tool with our current clients with great results, and now we are opening up a beta program to gather more feedback. The beauty of this framework we've developed is it's easy to make changes and add more tools, and we have an entire development team behind this, so we will be able to update this application rapidly with tools that this community needs.
Join the Beta Program
We are only opening up this beta program to a limited number of users, so if you are interested, please click the link in the description today. We'd love to get your feedback about how we can improve this tool before we launch it to the public!
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