Education

Deploy Stop Motion Studio Pro on Windows 10 and 11 through Endpoint Manager

This guide will take you through these 3 steps, needed to deploy a fully activated app to your Company Portal. It consists of these three steps:

1. Preparations
2. Stop motion studio pro package in Endpoint manager (Intune)
3. Product key package deployment

Preparations

You will need these items:

The Installation file

Note: You can open the bundle with 7Zip or your preferred compression utility to grab an installation file for a specific architecture. On the picture I have extracted the x64 package to create a quicker installation process for x64 only devices:

Dependencies: The installer will automatically download and install all necessary Microsoft dependencies. If the target device does not have an internet connection, you will need to deploy the dependencies alongside the main installation package. You can download the dependencies from here:

https://www.cateater.com/download/Stop Motion Studio for Windows Dependencies.zip

Unpack and grab the ones you need, and save them for later in a directory:

Least but not last the file containing your license key:

https://www.cateater.com/download/mdm.plist

Edit it with notepad and replace the X’s with your license key: Note: the full text of the file is available at that last step in the guide

Right, now we are set to create our deployment package.

Stop motion studio pro package in Endpoint manager (Intune)

If you do not have it, download IntuneAppUtil.exe from:

https://github.com/Microsoft/Microsoft-Win32-Content-Prep-Tool

We will need it for the product key deployment. First we create the Stop Motion Pro Line of Business app:

Enter Endpoint manager in your browser at:

https://endpoint.microsoft.com/#home

Press Apps in left side, choose Windows apps and press Add. From the dropdown, choose Line-of-business app:

Press Select and click Select app package file:

Click the folder icon and select your installation file - and click open:

Now Endpoint manager warns us of missing dependencies:

Go ahead and click the folder icon to add them from the folder where you extracted them earlier. Select all of them at once by selecting the topmost and while holding shift, click the bottom one:

Click open and verify that all of them has been added - click ok:

Fill out the details and add a cool logo. Click Yes on ‘Show this as a featured app in the Company Portal’. Press Next when you are done.

Now we need to select who will receive the package. I have created an Azure group which contains those users that is going to receive Stop Motion Studio Pro. I called it StopMotionPro. I prefer to give people the choice of installing it and add the group under Available for enrolled devices. If I wanted a forced installation, I would have added it under Required. Press Next when you are ready.

Click Create:

Next time Company Portal contacts Endpoint manager, Stop Motion Studio Pro will pop up. If Stop Motion Studio Pro does not pop up, check and see if your device is fully updated and try restarting the machine, as this will force the device to check in with Endpoint manager.

Product key package deployment

First off, we need a clean working folder and a destination folder for our package - they can be the same, but I like to keep it nice and tidy. I create the folder C:and the folder C:. Place the downloaded IntuneWinAppUtil.exe in appcreation:

Next, go to the c:folder and create a file called license.cmd. Be careful to name it correctly or it will show up as license.cmd but Windows notepad has sneakily named it license.cmd.txt behind the scenes. (I prefer using Notepad++ as it does not do these things). The file should have this content:

mkdir %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Packages\Cateater.StopMotionStudioPro_2heqmjw8skbma\LocalState

copy /Y mdm.plist %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Packages\Cateater.StopMotionStudioPro_2heqmjw8skbma\LocalState

Next copy or create your mdm.plist file in the input folder Don’t forget to add your key inside the file! Here is the raw content of the file:

          <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
          <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
          <plist version="1.0">
          <dict>
          <key>isHelpManagerEnabled</key>
          <true/>
          <key>isGUISoundEnabled</key>
          <true/>
          <key>isGalleryEnabled</key>
          <true/>
          <key>isStoreProjectsIniCloudEnabled</key>
          <false/>
          <key>ProductKey</key>
          <string>XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX</string>
          </dict>
          </plist>

Now your two folders should look like this.

Pop up a Command Prompt window and navigate to the appcreation folder. Here we invoke the IntuneWinAppUtil:

IntuneWinAppUtil now package our stuff:

And now in our Appcreation folder, we have our package:

Now go back into Endpoint Manager, but this time we need to create a different type of package, a Win32 package. Select Apps and select Windows apps in left side, click Add in the top like we did earlier, but this time select Windows App (Win32):

Press Select. Now click Select app package file. Click the folder icon and select the license.intunewin file that we packaged.

Press Ok

Change the name to something a little more descriptive and add a publisher

Hang in there - almost done. Type the name of out file on both install and uninstall and this is important, adjust the Install behavior slider to User. Note: If your users are not administrators on their device, you may need to create a workaround to place the file in the correct location. Click Next

Under Requirements I select 64-bit, as this is a purely 64-bit package and I select Windows 10 1909 or newer. Click Next.

Now we need to tell Endpoint manager how to detect a successful installationen. On the dropdown,select Manually configure detection rules. Click Add and in the right side of the screen, select File.

The path should be:

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Packages\Cateater.StopMotionStudioPro_2heqmjw8skbma\LocalState

Click Ok and then Next. Click Next on both Dependencies and Supersedence. Assign the same group we used for the StopMotionPro package, but this time, make it required:

Click Next and Create.