If you’re responsible for more than a handful of Macintosh workstations, you can’t get away with running from desk to desk with a firewire drive anymore. IT departments are getting the call to do more with less, and consultants who still charge time-and-materials aren’t getting called at all. For years now, Apple has stressed the .pkg format for mass deployment of their own software. If you’re responsible for deploying third-party applications, on the other hand, the best tool on the market right now might just be JAMF Software’s Composer 7.

Composer isn’t the only utility that builds install packages from an existing filesystem or from filesystem changes. Apple’s own PackageMaker, LANrev’s InstallEase, and open source project Iceberg all handle that task well enough. What makes Composer stand out is that it includes the best features from all those tools, and manages roll them into one well-designed, dead-simple, powerful and reliable piece of software.

The first time you launch Composer, you’re greeted with three options: To track newly installed files, new and modified files, or monitor active file system changes. Select one, then install the software you’d like to package up, and Composer will present you with the relevant files to roll into a nice, new .pkg. If the software you’d like to deploy is already on your machine, chances are it’s been included in Composer’s extensive library of pre-built package manifests, which allow you to collect the relevant files from an existing installation.

Composer includes advanced options for building OS images, such as removing caches, page files, Kerberos certificates, and Trash contents. It also features an editable exclusion list, letting you control which files to ignore when building package snapshots, a permissions inspector, and drag-and-drop setup for simple applications. And while JAMF would no-doubt like you to push out these packages with their Casper Suite, they’re compatible with any Macintosh deployment tool.

If there’s anything not to like about Composer 7, it’s the price tag, the highest of any application in its category. But while there may be lower-cost alternatives, Composer’s greatest value is the time it saves you getting your job done. Despite my generally suspicious nature and unreasonably high standards, Composer really is the best-of-breed tool available for Macintosh software deployment.

Composer 7 retails for $100.