System information

89
Parallels Mac Management Features
Silent Installation
If you configure the application to install silently, it will be delivered to a Mac and installed without
giving the user any control over the installation process. The only operation that the user will be
asked to confirm is restarting the Mac if it is required by a particular application. The options that
must be set in order to perform a silent installation are highlighted in the corresponding topics
describing the application deployment steps.
Interactive Installation
An interactive installation informs the Mac user that the application is available for installation and,
depending on the deployment configuration, gives the user full or limited control over the installation
process.
When preparing an application for interactive installation, you can specify the following options:
• An application can be either required to be installed or the user can be given a choice whether
to install it or not.
• The application installer can be displayed on the screen allowing the user to control the
installation process, or the installer can run in the background thus performing an unattended
installation. In both scenarios the user can choose whether to run the installer as soon as the
application is available or to postpone it to a later time.
The options that must be set in order to perform an interactive installation are highlighted in the
corresponding topics describing the application deployment steps.
Application Portal
When an application is configured to be deployed interactively as described above, it will be added
to Application Portal on a Mac. Application Portal is an OS X application (provided by Parallels) that
allows a Mac user to view and install applications made available to them by their system
administrator. Application Portal is installed when the Parallels Mac Client is installed on a Mac.
When preparing an application for deployment, you need to specify the properties that will be used
in Application Portal to provide a Mac user the ability to identify, filter, and sort the available
applications. The properties that relate to Application Portal are highlighted in the corresponding
topics describing the application deployment steps. Application Portal is described in detail in the
Using Application Portal section (p. 96).
Preparing Mac Application for Configuration Manager
Before you can deploy OS X application packages to Mac computers, you must use the
CMAppUtil utility to convert them to a Configuration Manager .cmmac format.
The CMAppUtil utility is provided by Microsoft. To obtain the utility: