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Apologies for bringing up something that has been covered here before, but the solution still seems rather opaque to me as I have never used MCX for anything. We have about 200 Macs in labs and now that we are using Casper 9.61, I would like to stop using the default user template and use MCX or some other method involving MDM (if possible) to ensure our non-admin AD users who login to these Mac systems don't have to personalize Office 2011 and wait for its font cache to build every time they login for the first time -- which for some of our labs means every time they login.



I see in my JSS there is a way to do some MCX things but I need a little more of a step-by-step guide to get this working. If you already have this working, please share. I read most of the articles I could find in messages here on JAMF Nation but a lot of them are dated or those websites don't exist anymore. This article in particular seems very good:



http://managingosx.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/mountain-lion-and-mcx/



...but now that we are on Yosemite, there may be new wrinkles.



Cheers...

to stop the font cache building, i believe you will need to copy the MS user data folder into the users documents folder. if they are mobile ad accounts, or ad accounts with local homes, then the user template works for this. But as you have mentioned you'd like to avoid this then I would suggest a launchagent that runs a script to copy this MS user data folder from another location ie /Library/Scripts/CorpEduTemplateFiles/Microsoft User Data/ into the users home directory at login. This same action could also copy the preferences into the users home folder. You could try to convert the MCX to profiles - have a look at https://github.com/timsutton/mcxToProfile

Also you can write the preferences to "/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.xxxxxxxx" instead of User Templates.



Have a look here:
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=10345#responseChild58681

Thanks to all. Great information. I think I'll go with defaults write.

Defaults write didn't seem to work for the organization name or user name even though I checked the syntax thoroughly. In the end I captured the changes after personalizing Office with my admin account and captured a snapshot of those with Composer, created a disk image and populated new and existing home directories in the workflow. Seems to work without crashes, but it has to re-do the font cache first time.

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