Bosco1983

Q: Sidebar custom settings / Profile Manager / El Cap

Hello,

 

this has been a bug bear for a long time now.  Basically I wish to customise my sidebar.plist file for my managed network users.   Profile Manager only has "finder" settings.  If I upload my sidebar.plist to profile manager under custom settings, it appears to be ignored.

 

Ive tried this on both user and device groups.  Has anyone had any success with this? 

Mac mini, OS X Server

Posted on Apr 25, 2016 7:02 AM

Close

Q: Sidebar custom settings / Profile Manager / El Cap

  • All replies
  • Helpful answers

  • by Bosco1983,

    Bosco1983 Bosco1983 May 27, 2016 4:32 AM in response to Bosco1983
    Level 1 (61 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    May 27, 2016 4:32 AM in response to Bosco1983

    Anyone running custom sidebars?  I'd be very surprised if everyone is happy with the default view.

  • by Bosco1983,

    Bosco1983 Bosco1983 Aug 25, 2016 6:37 AM in response to Bosco1983
    Level 1 (61 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Aug 25, 2016 6:37 AM in response to Bosco1983

    Anyone here managed to manage sidebar via profile manager?  Uploading custom sidebar.plist simply doesnt work

  • by Antonio Rocco,Helpful

    Antonio Rocco Antonio Rocco Aug 25, 2016 12:48 PM in response to Bosco1983
    Level 6 (10,582 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Aug 25, 2016 12:48 PM in response to Bosco1983

    AFAIK Profile Manager can't read plist files easily if at all? It "knows" property lists in XML format.

     

    What I tend to do is open the plist - for example the com.apple.driver.AppleHIDMouse.plist after adding the Secondary Click option to button 2 - in Property List Editor. Look at the keys and manually recreate them in a Custom Settings payload. I drop the plist suffix when naming the payload. It's been a while but this method has worked for me in the past. Charles Edge on Krypted more or less advocates a similar method although he looks at WorkGroup Manager's Preference Manifest and manually adds the keys that way.

     

    Maybe trying the plutil command to convert property lists to xml ones will work for you? Once converted they can be added/uploaded to a Custom Settings payload.

     

    Assuming you've adjusted the sidebar:

     

    sudo plutil -convert xml1 /Users/localadmin/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist -o /Users/localadmin/Desktop/com.apple.sidebarlists

     

    The above is all in one line and converts com.apple.sidebarlists.plist and saves it in xml format on the local admin user's Desktop. I've used the -o switch to specify a different destination otherwise plutil will convert it in place.

     

    From there you can add/upload it to Profile Manager. Try it. It might work for you? Let us know if it does.

     

    On a separate note I've managed to use WorkGroup Manager successfully on El Capitan and it still works. What is not working are the Managed Client X extras which augment and extend the Preferences Manifest in a major way. Anything configured using Managed Client X threw up error messages as well as making WorkGroup Manager unstable. At least it did in the network environment (Active Directory) I was using it in. Sticking to just what's in the Interface as well as making sure Profile Manager was not open at the same time and not overlapping management settings worked as expected.

     

    I found in my testing Mobility settings worked better using WorkGroup Manager than Profile Manager. However I am using Mobility in a way that is not ideal so I can't really complain.

     

    Hopefully this may help?

     

    Tony

  • by Bosco1983,

    Bosco1983 Bosco1983 Aug 25, 2016 12:51 PM in response to Antonio Rocco
    Level 1 (61 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Aug 25, 2016 12:51 PM in response to Antonio Rocco

    Wow! Now that's a response!

    Thank you so much Tony, I'll try that as soon as I'm back at work. I've literally just today taken annual leave for a month so it will be a while until I'm back at my servers.

     

    I'll let you know how I get on. Would be nice for Apple to include these settings in profile manager without the custom way of working. Although this way has a cool geeky element to it