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Hello! First time poster here, hope everyone’s doing well.
I have a couple of questions regarding the macOS application policies, hopefully someone can lend me a hand and help out 🙂 My BT EPM for Mac is currently set to ‘listening mode’ - it reports back on our users application usage nwhat’s installed, what’s opened, what’s being used etc.]. I want to use it to create policies on applications that should be ‘allowed’ or ‘disallowed’ based on different factors. The questions are as follows:

  1. When adding a policy based on a reported application, the in-built ‘add to policy’ button gives me two automatically assigned arguments: URI and Publisher. Could someone explain, what an URI is? Is it ok to use that as an argument regarding if an application should be allowed for usage? My first though was that it’s the applications unique ID - the bundle ID - but that’s not it after further insight.
  2. Is there a way to have an argument that uses the Bundle ID of an application? for example: com.microsoft.teams2
  3. How do you handle adding application policies to the workstyles? Having just the Publisher argument does not feel like the safest option, and having HASH argument probably won’t work timewise, as every new application version would require another policy.
  4. The Events tab of the application shows the HASH and other additional information, but when adding a policy based on that application, and adding for example the HASH argument, it does not automatically fill out. Is that how it’s supposed to work? I know for a fact that on Windows, when you click the ‘+’ icon with the chosen argument, it autofills the information from that app, to that argument.

Hopefully the questions can be answered and are understandable 🙂 In case of additional questions for me, please feel free to ask.

I’ll answer the best I can:

  1. URI is Uniform Resource Identifier.  I don’t quite know what it does but I know that it is similar to a URL but for applications.  It makes a very good part of an application definition.  You can certainly use it just about any way you wish.
  2. I’m not sure what a Bundle ID is but your example is very similar to a URI.  Maybe they are the same?
  3. I’d recommend at least two definitions for each application.  URI and Publisher work great together.  I’d recommend staying from hashes for the reason you identified.
  4. It’s my understanding that if it is blank when adding from analytics, then, for whatever reason, EPM hasn’t identified that aspect of the application.  If you know it, you can certainly put it in but if it isn’t there automatically, it probably won’t recognize it next time it launches.

Hope that helps.


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