User Interaction for “Manage On-Going Process” Pre-Deployment Activity

User Interaction for “Manage On-Going Process” Pre-Deployment Activity

Hello everyone,

Endpoint Central already provides the “Manage On-Going Process” option as a Pre-Deployment Activity for Software Deployment packages.

This is useful for checking whether a specific application/process is currently running before starting an installation. Currently, we can configure the activity to either:

  • Kill the running process

  • Wait until the process is no longer running

However, there is currently no real user interaction associated with this activity.

For example, if an application such as Outlook needs to be closed before an installation, it would be very useful if Endpoint Central could display a notification to the logged-on user such as:

“An application update is ready to be installed. Please close Microsoft Outlook to continue.”

The user could then have options such as Close Application Now or Postpone.

A configurable timeout could also be provided. For example:

  • Ask the user to close the application

  • Allow postponement for a configurable amount of time / number of times

  • After the deadline or timeout is reached, automatically close the process and continue the installation

Current behavior

When using “Wait until the process stops”, the package does not actually remain in a waiting state. The deployment attempt ends and the package is reported as something similar to “Will retry at next refresh cycle.”

This makes it difficult to provide a predictable installation workflow when applications must be closed by the user.

Suggested improvement

It would be great to extend the existing Manage On-Going Process activity with the same kind of modern Endpoint Central Agent notification/user interaction already available for other deployment scenarios.

The workflow could then be:

Process detected → Notify user → User closes application or postpones → Process check continues → Installation starts automatically

Optionally, after a configured timeout/deadline:

Process detected → Notify user → Timeout reached → Force-close process → Continue installation

This would make the existing Pre-Deployment Activity much more powerful while providing a significantly better user experience, without requiring administrators to build custom PowerShell/PSADT solutions just to handle application closure before software installation.