

I've long through someone could do well to use Chocolatey as the source of truth for a ConfigMgr metadata stream. Chocolatey is the closest thing I know of but it's ConfigMgr integration isn't free/great. There's some crowd-sourced community efforts ( CMPackager, RuckZuck, Chocolatey) out there that have been mentioned here but none of them have any kind of critical mass to support 100s of apps. Patch My PC Docs The configuration guides will help you setup the Patch My PC Publisher with Microsoft Configuration Manager and Microsoft Intune. To say nothing of the initial app install which in many cases require some amount of customization/configuration. Further complicating matters is that not every org is going to want apps packaged with the same options. When installing the product we provide an option called Intune Standalone mode.

It's populating that stream with app data that is a tireless, never ending, grind that takes a high level of skill to do right.

The cold-hard reality is that delivering a stream of 3rd party update metadata isn't that hard. Yea, there's no real 'free' alternative here.
