I strongly believe we need a native application for Mac and Linux and get rid of the JAVA dependance on those platforms. I see a growing amount of macs in my customer environments but they decide to not put a ZCMagent on those cause of the JAVA requirements. We need a deep integration of the agent into the plaform comparable with a Windows+ZCMagent expirience to be succesfull.
by: Sebastiaan V. | over a year ago | Supportability
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The ZEN team will laugh at this since they spent a lot of time removing this dependency, but I really do think that Mono is now far enough along that a mono runtime can be substituted as a completely self-contained runtime for ZEN and a lot of the .NET work in the Windows agent can be leveraged.
Now that MS has bought Mono a while back its certainly become an option again:)
More evidence of shift from Windows to Mac ... so we really need serious Mac support. I've several customer using Mac's and they need 3th party software to manage those.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/19/ge_apple_move_impact_microsoft_analysis/
I am tbe world’s biggest Mono fan, but I am certain it is never coming back to ZENworks. The Mac client is modular enough that they could add bits in C or Swift if necessary, but I am certain there will always be a Java depwndenxy. Maybe ZEN could bundle its own Java runtime.
“dependency”
The Java part (dependency) is what customers do not like and so choose to use another solution. While in general the Mac workforce grows (and MS does more itself) ZCM looses ground imo. Mac management is just a joke compared to ZCM on Windows... (not my words)
Could't agree more Sebastiaan!! If Mono is not an option, why can't the new ZCM agent be written in Swift; Apple's modern programming language?
On a personal note, any application that runs on Java, being a Windows application or a Mac application is something our organisation steers away from. They are difficult to administer & Java is a terrible client. I have never spoken to a system admin that does not hate it!!