One of the responsibilities of any one managing AVD is to patch Golden Images, not only the OS but applications. Before UAM it could be scripted using a multitude of ways and tools to update or install an app. With the introduction of UAM it gives another method built into NMM to decouple the App install/updates from the base image and moves it to the host creation phase or the image creation phase.
What I am proposing is a wizard that could look at the installed applications on a host pool, since this is already captured for fslogix app rule sets, and could help create UAM app deployments based on the list of installed apps to ensure all applications are either updated or installed with the option to define if it is done at the clone image, the source image or at host creation. As some apps are always apart of the source image and need patched there (windows Store apps, office, .net), while others can be deployed on the clone image during image creation or during host creation. The wizard would be able to determine the applications installed, and what underlying Image the pool is using so it knows what to apply the UAM app install/updates to. It could help add the apps to the Unified catalog if not already added, and then apply them to the customer account. It could create the Deployment policies if being applied to the Host Pool. It could check the image for a scheduled task and add to it the App Management and apply the apps needed, or it could create the scheduled task. This would ensure in a very easy way that all applications are being patched and allows us to move into using UAM in an easy automated way, rather than manually assessing every image and building UAM deployments.
I am going to go a little further, which I know would be a separate request but, im gonna add it here anyways. I would also love to see an assessment of an image that would show all apps installed on the image and then if those apps are up to date or not. winget allows you to get a list of all applications it sees on a windows machine and then identifies any that needs updating, bring that functionality to NMM so you could look at a image and see a list of apps and status and then could choose an action from there to update the apps, including being able to schedule or trigger it with an image creation task. This would be my preferred method of implementing UAM for existing images to help us ensure applications are being patched that exist on the Golden Image.
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