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

This guide will walk you through 3 steps to deploy a fully activated app to your Company Portal. It's pretty straightforward and consists of these three steps:

1. Preparations
2. Stop Motion Studio Pro package in Endpoint Manager (Intune)
3. Product key package deployment

Preparations

You'll need a few things to get started:

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. In the picture, I've extracted the x64 package to make the installation process quicker for x64-only devices:

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

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

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

And finally, 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 the last step in the guide.

Great, now we're ready to create our deployment package.

Stop Motion Studio Pro package in Endpoint Manager (Intune)

If you don't have it already, download IntuneAppUtil.exe from:

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

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

Open Endpoint Manager in your browser at:

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

Press Apps on the 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 – then click open:

Now Endpoint Manager warns us about 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 one and, while holding Shift, click the bottom one:

Click open and verify that they've all 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're done.

Now we need to select who will receive the package. I've created an Azure group containing the users who will receive Stop Motion Studio Pro. I called it StopMotionPro. I prefer to let people choose to install 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're ready.

Click Create:

Next time the Company Portal contacts Endpoint Manager, Stop Motion Studio Pro will appear. If it doesn't pop up, check if your device is fully updated and try restarting it, as this will force it to check in with Endpoint Manager.

Product key package deployment

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

Next, go to the c:\input folder and create a file called license.cmd. Be careful to name it correctly, or it will show up as license.cmd.txt behind the scenes (Windows Notepad does that sometimes!). (I prefer using Notepad++ as it doesn't do that). 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's 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.

Open a Command Prompt window and navigate to the appcreation folder. Here, we run the IntuneWinAppUtil:

IntuneWinAppUtil now packages everything up:

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 on the left side, click Add at 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 our file for both install and uninstall, and importantly, adjust the Install behavior slider to User. Note: If your users aren't 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 installation. On the dropdown, select Manually configure detection rules. Click Add and on 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.