Starting with SCCM 1906 you can install applications to a device in real-time. This feature can help reduce the need for separate collections for every application which is a common scenario in many enterprises.
Using this method, a client receives no policy. The app won’t appear in Software Center and a user can’t install the app when you create the deployment.
After you initiate the action to install the app, the user now sees it in Software Center can install it and see its installation status.
Prerequisites
Before you can use the feature, you need to enable the optional feature in the Administration pane.
- Open the SCCM Console
- Go to Administration / Updates and Servicing / Features
- Right-click and select Turn-on on the Approve application requests for users per device feature
- Once done, close the Console and re-open it
SCCM Install applications device real-time
Once the console has been restarted, you now need to select which applications will be available when you’ll select the action to Install an application on a device.
To do so, you need to create an Available Deployment on a collection which contains your devices. As stated in the introduction, this deployment won’t be visible to the user on their devices. In our example, we’ll deploy 7Zip on a specific collection but you could use all your devices for simplification purpose. Be sure to fully test the feature before doing so.
Create Deployment
- In the Software Library / Application Management / Applications
- Right-click your application and select Deploy
- Select your deployment collection, click Next
- In the Content pane, ensure that your application is sent to your distribution point, click Next
- In the Deployment Settings
- Select Purpose: Available
- Check the An administrator must approve a request for this application on the device checkbox
- In the Scheduling pane and User Experience, leave it as is and complete the Deploy Software Wizard
Now the Application is ready to be selected and deploy easily to all devices which are member of this collection. This can help reduce the need for separate collections for every application.
On a devices, the Software Center is not showing the Application, this is the default and expected behaviour
Initiate installation on a device
We will now trigger the new Install Application action directly on the device to show the process
- In Assets and Compliance / Devices
- Right-Click the desired device and select Install Application
- A new wizard opens and you can select any application that has a deployment (see the previous version) and click Ok
- Once selected, the application appears Automatically in the device Software Center. No need to refresh policy. The user can now select the Application and Install it.
- In our test, the application appears after 5 seconds
Monitoring the deployment
You can monitor the deployment as any other “normal” deployment using the Monitoring / Deployments pane
Cancel the Application deployment
If desired, you can cancel the deployment on the device simply by Denying the Approval request
- Go to Software Library / Application Management / Approval Requests
- Right-click your Application Request and select Deny
- After 5 seconds, the application disappears from our Software Center
11 Comments on “Install applications to a device in real-time using SCCM 1906”
For those of you who delegate security permissions to others, they will need the following permissions:
Application: Read, Approve
Collection: Read, Read Resource, Modify Resource, View Collected File
or simply assign them to the Application Administrator built-in role.
I also want to give limited admins this ability. Has anyone done this?
I love this feature and have made many applications available to install this way to speed up software install requests/tickets for the helpdesk. The down fall is since version 1806 denying the requests also uninstalls it from the device, so unless you make a new application that doesn’t have a uninstall command in the deployment type all the requests have to stay in the approval state and will stay there for what seems like forever. I/we really don’t need to keep them around once the software was installed and would love to have the ability to remove/delete the requests without manually editing the database.
thank you helpful.
Hi Benoit,
Nice post and thank you. When deny approval used, will it uninstall the app on that machine?
Thanks,
Suraj S
I do not think this is intended to push to many at once, you use the traditional methods for that.
This is for that “one” user that needs a app “right now”
I am having the same problem. We can’t use this feature for a device collection?
I just set this up in my test environment and ran into something that threw me off a bit. Once I deployed the application as instructed, I opened the collection where the app was deployed to. I Right-Clicked on one of the member computers and the Install Application option was completely missing. I checked several other systems with the same result. I made sure my console was fully updated and I restarted my console a couple times and the issue persisted.
After analyzing your screenshots I noticed that you are in the Devices list and not in a specific Collection, so I tried that and sure enough I found my “missing” Install Application option.
Is this something you can replicate or is this only in my environment? I can see this causing a headache when trying to install an application on a list of systems if your environment has hundreds or thousands of systems. I also noticed you can’t use this when selecting more than one computer, the option gets grayed out.
Fernando, I noticed exactly the same. It’s odd that we should have to use the Devices collection rather than a specific one to manually install an application.
I guess you could edit consoles menu xml files so you can get it to show in collections also.
I can see the option on the menu but my limited administrators cannot. How do I grant them permissions to this?