Asana installer for non-admin users

Product Feedback
#1

Background:
We have customer requirements that do not allow our users to have admin privileges on their local accounts. This means they are not able to install/remove app’s. Being a Mac shop we rely on a MDM/pkg manager to install the apps for the users. In our case we use a pkg manager called Munki but Jamf, SimpleMDM, and Kandji would be other examples.

Our Problem:
After a user installs the Asana desktop app they will be asking to also install a “Helper” app. Because our users do not have privileges to approve the install of the helper app it turns into a ticket frenzy. We will see tickets blow up with “Asana needs admin to finish the install” and we do not have a good way to deal with this.

Solution(s):
Dont include the helper app. We have automated the patching of your software via Autopkg(r). We would prefer it if you simply did not try and automate the updating of your own app and just allow our systems to do it for the user. You may also want to support the Mac Admin communities by creating and maintaining your own Asana Autopkg recipe (GitHub - autopkg/autopkg: Automating packaging and software distribution on macOS.).
2nd option. Use a pkg that would install both the app and your helper app with a single install. You could also build the pkg to allow us to strip the helper app out if we chose to do so.

I am pretty sure we are not the only company that does not allow admin rights to its users. I and pretty sure there are a number of us out there.

Thanks

1 Like
#2

Hi @Carey_White, welcome to the Asana Community Forum :wave:

Thanks for taking the time to provide this feedback!

While this feature isn’t available at this time, hopefully it’s something our Product team can implement in the future.

I’ll keep you posted and let you know if we have any updates :slight_smile:

#3

This is an issue for us too. We get IT tickets every week with users asking us to remote into their computers to provide admin permission for updates.

Options that might work are to remove whatever feature requires admin rights on every update (if feasible), or at least allowing us to disable auto-update so it’ll stop prompting users.

Finally, packaging as an MSI instead of EXE can help a bit for automated deployment. We have already asked PatchMyPC to support your app, and it’s possible there is something you could do directly with them to make it easier to support. Asana Desktop App | Patch My PC Feature and Application Request

#4

Agree. The app either needs to keep itself updated with no additional administrator requirements (very common for apps to do) or not offer/force updates that require it. These are standard features in the industry, especially for enterprise level apps.