Kevin M. Cox

Configuring MunkiReport Dashboards

Kevin M. Cox May 6, 2020 3 Comments

MunkiReport version 4, released over a year ago, added support for multiple customizable Dashboards. Previous releases allowed an admin to configure the homepage with selected widgets, but that was all.

The added Dashboard functionality gives admins the ability to have an unlimited number of customized views with particular widgets for different reporting needs that can be switched between using a menu or keyboard hotkeys.

This post was originally supposed to accompany my presentation at the Houston Apple Admins meetup in September 2019, but obviously I got a little behind.

The information is still relevant so read on if you are interested.

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Delete Zoom with a Munki NoPkg

Kevin M. Cox April 10, 2020 1 Comment

Zoom Video Communications has been in the news again lately, and not in a good way. Shortly after Google and the U.S. Senate made the decision to ban Zoom from all their devices my company followed suit.

We didn’t have Zoom installed on a large percentage of our computers, but I still needed a way to remove it now and in the future. Utilizing information shared by other MacAdmins, and the official documentation, I compiled a list of all files Zoom installs across macOS and wrote a script to search and destroy.

If the details could be helpful for you please read on.

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Deploying Photo Mechanic 6 with Munki

Kevin M. Cox January 9, 2020 3 Comments

Photo Mechanic 6 (PM), released last year, is a major overall to the venerable software used by photojournalists worldwide. It is now 64-bit for compatibility with macOS Catalina and includes a number of other changes from PM5.

Thankfully the ability to programmatically activate and deactivate is still there so only a few changes are needed in our Munki scripts.

What follows is basically the same as my post from last year, Deploying Photo Mechanic 5 with Munki, without all the background details, so read on if you want to see the changes needed to the scripts.

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Suppressing Microsoft AutoUpdate’s new macOS Upgrade alert

Kevin M. Cox November 17, 2019 No Comments

Microsoft Office officially dropped support for macOS 10.12 Sierra last week with the release of the 16.31 updates. This came as no surprise to MacAdmins as the Office for Mac team announced the N-2 macOS support plan back on Sept. 4, 2018. What did come as a surprise was a new Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) alert encouraging users to upgrade to macOS Catalina.

This obviously presents a problem in managed environments where end users are not able to upgrade themselves directly though the App Store. While most admins should focus their efforts on upgrading computers to a newer version of macOS, in environments where computers must remain on Sierra or older, suppressing this dialog is desired.

Thankfully it is possible to do so with a configuration profile, read on for the details.

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Microsoft AutoUpdate Daemon renamed

Kevin M. Cox September 16, 2019 1 Comment

A last minute decision to rename Microsoft AutoUpdate’s daemon from “Microsoft AU Daemon.app” to “Microsoft Update Assistant.app” in version 4.15 caused an unexpected dialog to appear for users last week.

MacAdmins have been suppressing this standard macOS dialog for several years by pre-registering Microsoft AutoUpdate in the Launch Services database. The sudden name change caused the dialog to unexpectedly appear during the monthly update cycle of Microsoft Office in September.

Read on for details of what needs to be updated in your script to suppress this dialog for users going forward.

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Privacy and Consent changes in Microsoft Office 16.28

Kevin M. Cox August 15, 2019 3 Comments

Microsoft Office 16.28, released Tuesday, includes a new privacy dialog for users and a number of changes to the preferences that control privacy and telemetry settings. This new dialog cannot be directly suppressed for Office 365 users, but can for those with a 2019 Volume License.

Microsoft has provided documentation, Use preferences to manage privacy controls for Office for Mac, of these new preferences and Paul Bowden provided a Keynote slide deck, Privacy and Consent Controls (PDF version), from a set of video conferences he hosted last week. (Unfortunately video recordings of the calls are not available.)

Thanks to the hard work of the Office for Mac team most of these preferences can be managed via configuration profiles. Read on for an overview of the changes and items of note.

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Forcing Microsoft Office update deadlines with MAU

Kevin M. Cox July 30, 2019 2 Comments

Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) version 4.13, released in mid-July, adds the ability to force update deadlines for Office applications. I was one of the MacAdmins who provided Microsoft developers with feedback starting last October and am happy to see the feature come to fruition.

This new functionality will definitely change how I handle updates as described in my post “A hybrid approach to managing Microsoft Office updates.”

The documentation Microsoft provided around the new feature is pretty good. But there has definitely been a lot of confusion in the MacAdmins Slack around getting it to work and there are some quirks to be aware of. If you are interested in the intricacies please read on.

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Disabling Microsoft AutoUpdate’s new Required Data Notice in managed environments

Kevin M. Cox July 19, 2019 3 Comments

Version 4.13 of Microsoft AutoUpdate for Mac, released on Tuesday, contains a new Required Data Notice that will pop up immediately upon installation and must be acknowledged before MAU will continue to function.

While the user experience is not great, thankfully Microsoft has provided us a way to suppress the new dialog on managed systems. Read on for the details.

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Microsoft Teams notifications from MAU Caching Server

Kevin M. Cox June 28, 2019 1 Comment

Back in February I wrote about Automating MAU Caching Server with Slack Notifications and it has been working great. Earlier this week a request was made on Github to add support for sending notifications to Microsoft Teams.

We don’t use Teams here at work but a quick search showed it supports messages via an incoming webhook, just like Slack, so I decided it give it a try. It didn’t take long to adjust the code and after realizing I could create a Teams workspace for free I got it tested in short order.

Paul Bowden merged my pull request so if you’d like to take advantage just grab version 2.6 of the MAUCacheAdmin script. If you are interested in the details read on.

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Installing and registering DetectX Swift with a single package

Kevin M. Cox May 22, 2019 No Comments

Yesterday a colleague on the MacAdmins Slack asked for some help creating a package that would both install and register DetectX Swift (DTXS) all in one shot. He was having trouble getting it to work with Jamf Composer even though a couple of us agreed that in theory his method should be working.

While admins are able to easily register DTXS after installation using management tools, in my case Munki and in his Addigy, the goal was to create a package that could be installed manually by less savvy techs or sporadically as needed via Apple Remote Desktop (ARD).

I had a little time at lunch today and decided to give it a try as a basic package using pkgbuild. Thankfully it worked perfectly right out of the gate, read on if you’d like the details.

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