Disable Microsoft Auto Updates via ARD/Terminal

You could use the defaults command in the Send Unix Command to push out a change to the com.microsoft.autoupdate2 domain, which would alter the preference to manual. I don't have the exact syntax since I've never had to do this, but if you look up the man page for the defaults command, then use the following command to read that preference file:

defaults read com.microsoft.autoupdate2

you can probably figure it out. It's probably going to be something like

defaults write com.microsoft.autoupdate2 HowToCheck Manual

but I may not have the syntax stated correctly. You can test it in Terminal on a test machine to work out the syntax, then use ARD to push the command to your clients.

Regards.

Glad that worked for you; it was just a guess as to syntax.

Cheers.

Hey Guys--

Here's an add-on question to the OP: Anybody have a clue how to do this while the users are logged out, or if there happen to be multiple users on a particular machine? The command given above will work for the user that's currently logged in, but this preference file/setting is not global. IOW, it lives in ~/Library/Preferences for each user, rather than the machine-wide /Library/Preferences. I'm wondering if there's a way to have ARD send the defaults command to each user directory it finds in /Users. Any ideas?

Thx,

Fred

Since you are going to do the updates manually, I think you could just delete the autoupdate program at

/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0 using a unix command with ARD. I did that back when I had a setup for some network users that made them get a "you don't have authority to run ..." message when they opened word, and there didn't seem to be a negative impact. Users can still check manually. I think.

Chic

Hi Fred,

Sending the command to all user accounts may be useful; but what happens if you then add new users? And if your pushing htis command out, I'm going to assume your probable going to want to do this with other settings in the future.

Instead I would suggest using MCX to tell the computer to apply this setting to all accounts on the computer. The nice thing about using MCX, is that it will apply to accounts that haven't even been created. You can use Directory Utility to modify the local MCX of a computer. (Directory Utility is a free download from Apple's website. the download is called Server Admin Tools. )

One you create a local MCX setting, you can use ARD to pusht hat setting out to all your computers.

If you have many computers, ushally you would setup a Mac OS X Server to run an Open Directory. That open directory could then be used to push out MCX settings to all the client comptuers on your network.

Good idea, TeenTitan! I already have all of these machines in a Mac OS X Server/OD setup, so it was a pretty simple matter of importing my own prefs file into WGM under [Group] -> Preferences -> Details. Testing shows that the auto-update setting returns to "Manual" after logout and log back in, even if the user has changed it to automatic. Thanks a bunch!

MarcBingham, you should mark Titan's post as Helpful, if you get a moment.

Thx,

Fred

As an update to this thread.

MCX would indeed be a way to do this for users, however MCX aka. Managed Preferences is deprecated in Mavericks and you should instead do this via Profile Manager. There is also another method you could use, if you put this preference in the User Template folder then any user account created afterwards will take a copy of the plist file and use it. The following command would create a plist in the User Template folder with this setting

sudo defaults write /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.autoupdate2 HowToCheck Manual

You could also add this to a DeployStudio (or similar) imaging work flow by adding the following to a generic script step

/usr/bin/defaults write /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.autoupdate2 HowToCheck Manual

By the way, my thanks to varjak for the original solution.

Thanks I plan to use this on my next deployment.

The only file called com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist is in root's ~/Library/Preferences/ and the only entry it contains is for Silverlight.

Could someone post more details about where they're finding this plist?