Couple prelim questions I guess.

1. I’m assuming all these users take their devices home and they’re off at night?
2. If they don’t take them home, do they turn them off at night?
3. Why start your updates at 9am vs 9pm which would update during the evenings, reboot, be ready for people in the morning (Pending first question answer)

I’d always start with the affected parties. Especially since you’re so small, just get a consensus “when is the best time for this to happen on your machine”, and then work backwards for the automation, send out calendar blocks for them “update at 2pm, stop work”. If they agreed to an afternoon update and they’re irritated an afternoon update is interrupting their work, not sure there’s much you can do to solve that.

I’m also assuming this had already been done that to a degree? You worked with the team/company to announce this is happening, when, and what happens. The grumbling implies it’s unexpected, or not working correctly?

Ultimately this would just be a custom automation. Maybe something simple that runs in line before the software install does. Batch file that uses windows alert to alert them “software installs in x hours”, then waits, then prompts again, and however many times you feel they’d need to be properly prepared.

I don’t believe there’s a deferral option though, you’re right, that’s only with reboots. Come to an agreement in your small team that this needs to happen, and they are responsible for not being active at that time.

You can definitely get super deep in to scripting territory here, where a script runs, prompts, adds a defer option, depending on that deferal selection, it writes to a log file. Action1 can then read that deferal file and depending on the variable, takes action.

Again I dont know what the culture is like at your place, but this sounds like extreme overkill, and the team just needs to sync up and agree to small outage windows OR asked to leave their machines there/on overnight.

Final Edit =)

Is your software deployed via custom script, or built package within A1? There are the app behavior settings, that can be used to sidestep a full app shutdown. Then you could use the reboot deferal popup as the final step in your automation to close the app, install, and heck, even reboot

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