Deploying Microsoft OCS Client

I have not yet begun looking at deploying OCS client to my macs... but it has been requested. Has anyone had to do this yet? I'm sure I could probably just push the package Microsoft gives us... but I'd like to at least enter the server name and such so the user doesn't have to do that.

I'm digging through plist files right now... they are pretty long and ugly.

Are you hosting the OCS server? Are you in an integrated AD environment?
Based on your answers your users may only need to know their UserID,
email addy, and password. It sets up a lot like Outlook with Exchange on
the Windows side. I have not attempted to package any installer though.
We probably won't offer it to our users as we don't run an in house OCS
server.

- JD

Are they user level, or where do they keep that info? Capture the change with composer, set it to push it out and make it self healing that way if it gets deleted, bam it gets replaced.

Given the proper configuration on the network (I'd have to ask our OCS
person here what does it) the client finds this information on it's own when
you configure it for corporate when you're on the network. My guess is that
when you give it your email address it actually looks to the domain
controller or mail server for the OCS information, most likely the domain
controller because I see this in my AD profile (see screen).

Packing it is the easy part.

Craig E

Do you mean Messenger for Mac?

If you have a working Kerberos environment and your Macs are bound to AD,
then setup can be automated so long as your network is properly configured.

We don't have such an environment, unfortunately, and one of my goals is to
dig into the correct Messenger .plist settings to try to set a lot of this
using Casper's MCX preferences feature. My experiments failed but I know I
didn't spend nearly enough time. Take a peek at the settings in:

~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.messenger.plist

You'll be interested in the keys:

RTCServerAddress RTCTransport

This will probably have to be set as "User Level Enforced" or "User Level at
Every Login".

Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Technical Analyst
MCS IT
Merrill Communications, LLC
(651) 632-1492

One last note on this, I've only been doing this with the current released
version of Messenger for Mac ver 7.0.2. I know that there should be an
updated client released soon, but I haven't worked with that of course.

I don't actually use the plain installer I actually have a package because
of some alias work we do here, but all that's in it is the app itself and
some information in Application Support.

Craig E

Thanks to everyone... I'll play with it next week and see where I can get.

For anyone who is interested I found these to pages that may be helpful:

Describes the keys in the preferences file
http://tinyurl.com/y8pmhsd <-- sorry, the url was huge!

The trusted Root CA issue
http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2008/03/05/104.aspx

We have macs that are bound to AD, and we have ones that are not and won't be for a while. I did create a test deployment package this afternoon, and it seems to work with some unwanted configuration needed by the end-user.

I packaged up the application and ~/Library/Preferences/ com.microsoft.Messenger.plist. I edited this plist before adding it into the package to include the server name of our OCS development server (we aren't live with it yet).

The newest version (7.0.2 090123) seems to put a keychain called "Microsoft_Intermediate_Certificates" in ~/Library/Keychains. It also seems to add an entry to ~/Library/Preferences/ com.apple.security.plist for the new keychain.

I tested my package, and it seems to work as expected. However I have not found a way to automate the user having to enter their username at first launch. In our dev environment, you have to use username at ad.domain.com as well as enter domainusername for the username. Maybe when this is in production things will be easier.

Thanks,
Ken