@bpavlov - this was a clean installations of yosemite and office 2011 (up to date) only a single user account on the computer.

I see talks of MCX profiles but don't know what it is, where to configure them ... etc..

why would the '' defaults write com.microsoft.......... that you supplied make a difference if the dmg i made already has preference changes that FUT/FEU will get ?

the .dmg i created and deployed to test machines seems fine and working great

@tcandela The problem with taking snapshots of a full plist is that you are literally copying the entire plist file (all preferences) over to each user. What happens if there is hardcoded path in the plist path that other users would not have access to? What if it's a setting that you didn't really mean to set? These are some of the issues that can come up with that approach: you end up copying preferences that you may not have intended to copy. It may work in most cases, but it only takes one situation for where it does not work and suddenly you're wondering where things went wrong.

For example, in the case of Office 2011 if you literally copied the preferences as they are after having 'configured' Office to your liking, you have literally hardcoded the first and last name values for each user. Seems unimportant, right? But did you know that Microsoft uses that information so that applications can track who makes changes to documents (this is helpful for example if you've ever worked in Word and reviewed documents or make use of SharePoint)? If your environment makes use of that future, you most definitely do not want to have that value hardcoded with something generic such as MYCOMPANYNAME.

Or as another example, lets say you set the AutoRecovery folder to /Users/jsmith/random/path/ for one of the Office applications. However, a new user (jdoe) logs into the computer, and they do not have access to /Users/jsmith/random/path/. That's a bit problematic. Now, imagine if jsmith doesn't even exist on each computer. I'm not sure where Office would try to create a recovery file, but I definitely don't want to find out in a worst case situation that the Auto Recovery feature was never working to begin with.

By finding out that specific preference you want to change there are a few benefits:
-you learn how the specific preference being changed in the plist file
-you can now create a new plist specifically for the preferences you want to set
-you can try to convert it into a configuration profile to manage using the method apple is trying to get everyone to use

The commands I gave you change specific preferences and nothing more. However you probably want to change the location where the defaults command is writing to otherwise the command as is will write to ~/Library/Preferences which you may not want if there are other preferences already there and you are looking to make a config profile out of a plist.

Learning how to make configuration profiles is rather simple. [https://github.com/timsutton/mcxToProfile](MCXtoProfile) is a free tool by @timsutton to convert MCX or PLISTs into configuration profiles. And Casper also supports creating custom configuration profiles as well from plist files (Computers tab -> Configuration Profiles -> New -> Custom Settings -> Configure).

Hopefully this makes sense.

Question:

When we set FUT and FEU on our policy using our Composer MS Office 2011.dmg, new users are missing the following folders in their newly created user ~Library folder.

Calendars
ColorSync
components
Dictionaries
KeyBindings
Keychains
Mail
QuickLook

When we simply delete these folders 0kb folders, log out and log back in and the folders are recreated.
Has anyone come across this and have a fix?
It only is happening with our MS Office .dmg

Thanks
Karl.

@kwsenger, if you view/edit your MS Office .dmg, what do you see in it? Do you have a Users folder? Those folders are not part of Office 2011 for Mac. If you see them in your package, then delete them. They are cruft (files unrelated to the application you've packaged).

You'll also need to remove them from your User Template folder in the System folder to prevent future users from getting the unwanted files.

@talkingmoose,
Thanks for the response.
When we mount the .dmg we have a ~user folder which contains a few ~/Application Support directories and ~/Library/Preferences setup .plist files so when a new student opens Word, Excel or PowerPoint for Business class, they do not see any setup screens and the apps simply open. If we remove the ~users folders we can simply make a .pkg since the only other folders are /Applications and /Library folders.

Thanks Moose.
Karl.

For people coming to this topic today, the "accepted solution" would be considered worst practice today. One of these two options would be best:

1. Microsoft now offers individual app installer packages. Just download the ones you want and add them to a policy.
2. Write a policy that caches the full Office installer and an appropriately-created choices.xml file (see post by foigus above) on the target computer and then runs the installer command with the -applyChoiceChangesXML option.

If you think the choices.xml option should be a part of installing packages in Jamf Pro (like it is in Munki), upvote this feature request.