Target Audience

Munki is an excellent way to manage Macs for an organization, school, or company, but some individual schools (that aren’t large school districts or universities) don’t necessarily have the time/people resources to dedicate to learn all the nuances of Munki implementation.

The primary target audience of this site is the one-person tech department at a small school that has Macs in its fleet. This person has to do budgets, software license and hardware acquisition and deployment, all tiers of tech support, network infrastructure, possibly some database management, and maybe even teaching classes on top of all that. Yes, these people exist, and they don’t have the time and energy to fully understand Munki, even if Munki can make their lives easier.

So the goal of this site isn’t to be a comprehensive Munki guide to show all the myriad ways to implement Munki. It’s really to get someone up and running who is already stretched thin and has some tech knowledge but isn’t a macOS expert.

One last thing: I have a certain audience in mind (under-staffed tech department at a small school), but that doesn’t mean other people can’t benefit from this site. You may not be the target audience for this site, but you may still “accidentally” benefit from it. Maybe you’re stretched thin at a non-profit that isn’t a school. Maybe you’re at a for-profit company, and you have only Windows admin experience and suddenly have to take on a fleet of Macs, and someone just happened to mention “Check out Munki” to you. You may find this helpful, but you aren’t the target audience.

Why target small schools? Because I work at a large school whose peers are small schools, who are often interested in Munki but find most Munki documentation daunting, because it tends to be targeted to Mac specialists at large corporations, universities, or school districts. I wanted a quick place to point them to, where they can follow instructions in a way to get to know some of the nuances of Munki but mainly to get up and running.

How to use this site

The Munki wiki is really the most comprehensive and up-to-date documentation on Munki out there. If you just want a quick reference to see what’s going on with a particular Munki feature, go to the wiki.

This site is designed as more of a linear “learn by doing” approach, not a reference. You’ll start with one tutorial to learn one thing, and then move on to the next tutorial to learn the next thing. Absolutely take advantage of those Previous post and Next post buttons at the bottom of each post.

Here’s the first post. Once you get to the bottom of it, click the Next post button to get to the next tutorial:
Why should your school use Munki to manage its Macs?