Managed Docks

[auchenick]

Hey all,

My colleague and I are pretty new at using Casper Suite to manage Macs. We currently have a Lab of Mac Pros for a Digital Arts classroom on campus where we are using the Casper suite to manage the docks. There is a policy that changes the com.apple.dock plist on login in case it has been changed away from the correct dock. It also has been baked in to the image into the English.lproj user profile, so any new user that logs on (The Macs are bound to Active Directory) gets that dock by default.

The other policy that has to do with this question is one that runs every day to delete the individual user folders from /Users so that the HDDs don't fill up.

Not necessarily the most elegant solution, I know, but it works.

We have a professor who is very adamant on setting his own dock the way up that he wants it. Is there a way I can exclude him from this without writing a custom script specifically to look for his user every time that it runs?

Thanks,

Andrew Uchenick
Apple Technology Support Specialist
Goucher College
andrew.uchenick@goucher.edu

[mm2270]

Don't know what version of Casper Suite you're using, but if its version 9, you now have the ability to add "exclusions" to policies, meaning under the Scope tab, you can click Exclusions, click Add, and then on Users and add his user account in. or just exclude his Mac if that's the only one he ever uses. But you mentioned a lab, so i'm guessing he may log into a different Mac each time?

Under Casper Suite version 8.x this isn't nearly as easy to do, and would probably involve some scripting.

[tkimpton]

dockutil ;)

[russeller]

You mentioned these are Active Directory accounts. In the JSS policy for modifying the dock you can go to the "Scope" tab in the policy and since this is a login trigger, you'll have an area called "Limit this Policy to the following Users". Under "Assign to Specific User Groups" choose the "Add User Group" and add a student only Active Directory group. We have an AD group like "All_Students", most K-8 organization should have something like this. This is also assuming you've added your Active Directory info under Settings > LDAP Server Connections.