Config Dock for new users

[Team]

Want to customize the dock for new users on a freshly imaged machine. I've tried creating the .dmg file in composer and loading that with a policy but no luck. Wonder if just replacing the .plist file is the better route but need some direction on that. Can anyone help or suggest a better method?

[donmontalvo]

We usually blast the *.plist and use dockutil to set up a new one. To be honest, not sure how well this works with 10.8, but we used this with great success on 10.6/7.

http://code.google.com/p/dockutil/

[Team]

Hmm been seeing dockutil listed a lot on here, I'll check it out but we are using 10.8. Thought I saw a few posts that said dockutil is buggy with 10.8

[vadanx]

I think you may have seen that from a post I started a while back, I believe it's been updated since then and works better with 10.8, however I have yet to test it. :)

[Team]

Problem solved, just copied a new default dock.plist into the User Template, package it up and upload to casper admin as part of my imaging config

[JPDyson]

I package the default user profile (this was one of my big steps toward vanilla base images). That's fine for setting the Dock before a user logs in, but that's not appropriate for adding an item to the dock later. You CAN do this with a defaults write command, you just have to include the entire XML dict for the new dock item, flattened out (no CR's/LF's/tabs, etc).