Deploying EditShare Connect Across an Organization at Scale

EditShare Connect (ESC) is the application your team members use to access EFS storage on their Windows, Mac, and Linux workstations.

While ESC can be used to access your storage via Samba (SMB), we strongly recommend using the native EFS mount protocol for best results, as this gives you access to Swift Read capabilities for reading/writing media across multiple EFS storage nodes servers, and it also provides you with automatic load balancing and fault tolerance so that workloads are distributed across all EFS servers, and services remain highly available. 

We recognize that deploying ESC and updates across an entire organization is an important task that is often the responsibility of the IT department. As such we've provided some helpful information to make it easier to accomplish this task.

Windows

The Windows version of EditShare Connect is provided as an industry-standard MSI installer that, among other things, includes both the EditShare Connect.exe GUI, and the EditShare File System.exe command line program that provides access to the EFS file system driver. In most cases, your users only need to run EditShare Connect; only unusual specialized scenarios require direct use of the command line tool.

The MSI installer supports silent-mode installations, which allows the software to be rolled out in an Active Directory domain or other centralized workstation management tool.

The MSI installer supports two optional modes that can be used:

1. /silent

   Does a fully automatic install, but also pops up a progress window. This option may not be suitable in some centrally managed environments where updates are scheduled to be run during off-hours when there may be no one logged in.

2. /verysilent

   Does a fully automatic install, with no graphical feedback. This option may be more suitable for the fully-automated & centrally managed scenarios noted above.

For more details, see the EditShare Storage Administrator’s Guide.

macOS

The macOS version of EditShare Connect is provided using Apple’s PKG package installer format, and is bundled with three sub-components:

1. EditShare Connect, the graphical application people use to access EditShare storage services.
2. EFSFUSE, the low-level software used to provide direct access to EFS storage services using the software’s own native protocol.
3. ACL Permissions UI, an optional Finder extension used with ACL media spaces. 

In nearly all cases, each Mac editing workstation needs EditShare Connect and EFSFUSE; the ACL Finder extension is only necessary when EditShare’s ACL media spaces are being used.

The EFSFUSE software uses an Apple-approved kernel extension (KEXT) for providing high-performance access to EFS storage services. In Apple’s ongoing efforts to tighten macOS security, they are encouraging developers to switch from kernel extensions to a new technology called system extensions. However, it is not currently feasible to implement a general-purpose filesystem driver using Apple’s system extension APIs, so Apple continues to fully support kernel extensions for applications that still require them, as EFSFUSE does.

Apple has, however, made the process of installing kernel extensions more complex than it was in the past. Administrators that need to batch-install EditShare Connect and EFSFUSE on many Mac clients can use Mobile Device Management (MDM) to streamline this process.

Jamf MDM settings for installing EFSFUSE on macOS workstations

One popular MDM provider for managing Mac networks is Jamf, which requires the following settings to allow installation of the EFSFUSE software:

Approved Kernel Extensions

• [x] Allow users to approve kernel extensions
• [x] Allow standard users to approve legacy kernel extensions (macOS 11 or later)

Approved Team IDs and Kernel Extensions

Approved Team ID

• Display Name: EditShare Connect
• Team ID: URJUZJ3GCG

Approved Kernel Extensions

(Optional) Approve the following bundle IDs only

• DISPLAY NAME: EditShare Connect
• KERNEL EXTENSION BUNDLE ID: com.editshare.EFS.filesystems.efsfuse

If you are using an MDM provider other than Jamf, you may need to adapt these settings, but you’ll probably need to assert something similar to these settings in your preferred MDM framework.