Robopack, how to get started

I’ve gotten the chance to play around with Robopack in my lab environment and wanted to give you the chance to follow along, what were my first impressions and what it can do for you.

Getting started

First thing you will want to do once signed in, is to connect Robopack to your Intune instance.

In the Tenant settings page, we can simply click on “Connect tenant”

Sign in with an Entra Account that has the required permissions to grant consent for the required app permissions:

A few seconds later, the tenant appears in the Robopack Console:

Add our first App

The easiest way to add our first app is the “Instant Apps” search, which feels similar to the Microsoft Enterprise App Catalog, I can simply search for an app:

Select the desired version:

Modify the base app parameters if needed:

And if I want, I can directly upload it to Intune and even let Robopack create a default set of groups to which the app will be assigned:

A few seconds later the app is ready:

And visible in Intune:

Custom Packages

Of course, Robopack is not only a fancy App catalog, it also helps you with your own custom packages:

Let’s use Siemens Step7 MicroWin32 as an example, we will upload the source folder:

Robopack automatically detected the msi file and suggests setup parameters:

We can modify them if needed and continue to directly let it upload to Intune:

The Package will then be uploaded:

And prepared:

And is finally ready and uploaded to Intune:

One really cool function is the possibility to add custom stuff like files or regkeys to your package:

Robopack Radar

Another cool feature is the Robopack Radar, which gives me a really cool overview of discovered apps that can be automatically patched by Robopack:

It will also show me a list of apps, which cannot be automatically patched and needs manual created packages:

Let’s say, I want to patch my git installations, as we already have found two different versions in my environment:

We can simply create a new patch flow for git:

Create one or more waves to deploy the app to a specific group:

Or even cooler, just update it on all devices that have an older version installed using the Radar Tracking:

And just like that we have an automatically updating git in our environment:

Robopatch

To enable patching for our apps, we don’t need to wait until the app is installed somewhere and detected by the Radar, we can also just directly add a new Robopatch rule for any app supported:

Let’s say I want to update FileZilla, we can simply search for it:

And from there it’s basically the same as before:

And just like that we have another app patched:

Conclusion

While I’m personally not a big fan of 3rd party addons to solutions like Intune, and often prefer to either give the 1st party option like the Enterprise App Catalog available in Intune Suite use community solutions or simply automate the stuff myself using PowerShell in DevOps, Azure Function Apps, Runbooks, or even in the Power Platform, as I like that every time a new challenge comes along I will learn something new.
However I’m aware that that does not match to everyone, if you are searching for a more mature solution, where you can get support if something goes wrong, or you just don’t want to do it yourself, Robopack can be a really good solution for you. The portal is really simple to use and still powerful enough to build complex packages with just a few clicks, it also has integrations to ConfigMgr and even an API is available so that you can integrate it in existing automations.