How To Quickly Open a Policy in Jamf Pro

We have a lot of policies. I mean over 1,000 policies in our Jamf Pro Server. Don’t ask. Part of it is out of necessity, but I’ll bet some of it is just because we were running so fast in 2018 to get systems enrolled and agencies under management, that we didn’t have time to, as Mike Levenick (@levenimc) recently put it, “trim the fat”. That’s what 2019 is all about. But I’m missing the point of this post: how to quickly open a policy. You can imagine how long it takes to load the list of policies when you have over 1,000 of them.

There are a couple of tools you’ll need. First up you’ll want a tool like Text Expander to create snippets or macros. I’m sure there are some free alternatives out there that will expand a text shortcut into something but Text Expander is what I’ve been using for many years, of course I’m using version 5 which is a perpetual license version and not the current subscription model. (Here’s an article about text expansion apps)

The second tool you’ll need is jss_helper from Shea Craig (@shea_craig). This will help us pull a list of the policies in our system, including the ID of the policy.

Now that you have your tools in place, the first thing you want to do is grab the URL of one of your policies. Just open a policy and copy the URL. Now go into Text Expander (or whatever tool you chose) and create a new snippet from the contents of the clipboard. Edit the URL removing everything after the equals (=) sign in the URL. Give your new snippet a shortcut and voila! You now have an easy way to get 90% of the way to quickly opening policies. Your URL snippet should look similar to this:

https://jss.yourcompany.com/policies.html?id=

Now let’s turn our attention to jss_helper. Once you have it installed and configured to talk to your JPS, you’re going to want to pull a list of the policies in your system. Open up Terminal (if it isn’t already) and run jss_helper with the following options:

jss_helper policies > ~/Desktop/policy_list.txt

Obviously you want to name that file whatever you want, but the cool thing is that you now have a list of every policy in your JPS along with its ID. If you open that file up in Excel or a text editor, you’ll see something like this:

ID: 2034 NAME: Installer Adobe Acrobat DC 19

ID: 1214 NAME: Installer Adobe Acrobat DC Reader

ID: 2030 NAME: Installer Adobe After Effects CC 2019

ID: 2031 NAME: Installer Adobe Animate CC 2019

ID: 2032 NAME: Installer Adobe Audition CC 2019

ID: 2033 NAME: Installer Adobe Bridge CC 2019

ID:  638 NAME: Installer Adobe Codecs

ID:  532 NAME: Installer Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop elevated App

ID:  314 NAME: Installer Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop Non elevated App

Now let’s put it together. Open up your web browser and in the address bar type whatever shortcut you created for the policy URL above. Once the URL expands, before pressing enter, type in the ID number of the policy you want to open and then press enter. The policy should open up without having to wait for the list of policies to load or having to search the web interface for the specific policy.

Hopefully this will help speed up your game and help you become quicker and getting stuff done.

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