Dock web link as self service item...not showing up

[spowell01]

So, I have two links that point to our local scholastic server for Educator Access and Student Access. I would like to have the dock icons/links available as a self service item. From my workstation, I had the two weblinks in my dock, and added them to casper admin as new dock items. In casper admin they show the path as file://localhost/Users/myname/desktop/scholastic.webloc/

and on top of that its NOT showing up in self service, I have it scoped to all computers and triggered by none or self service. Should casper reflect the path as my local machine, vs not having a path and just collecting the address of the actual web link? Maybe I just need to apply it as a policy, and not self service....Anyone added simple web links to the dock via self service?

[mm2270 · Accepted solution]

You might want to drop the actual links on your Mac into a more generally user accessible location and not your home directory, such as /Users/Shared/, then add them back into your Dock and upload the icons again while in Casper Admin. Trying to push out a link to something with a path to your own home folder to other Macs isn't going to go too well for you. Any icons added to Casper from your Dock are going to reflect the path to the actual alias, folder, application, etc. It doesn't read the contents of a .webloc and use that as the path.

Second, are you certain you actually enabled it for Self Service in the policy? Just setting the "Triggered By" to None (of Self Service Only) isn't enough. It also has to be checked on under the Self Service tab of the policy and optionally upload an icon to ride along with it.

Edit: Also, just adding them in Casper will still not work since the actual .webloc files aren't present on the target Macs, unless you plan to push those out via a policy behind the scenes. The users will end up getting a ? in their Dock and not the link you're looking to deploy.
If all you need is links to sites, why not consider using the Self Service URL plug-in feature?

[spowell01]

Thanks for the reply. We ended up adding the web links via a configuration profile and its applying properly with the icons we wanted. Also realized if I drag a link from the web to my dock and then add to casper admin, its showing the proper web path, and not the path to my desktop :) I will look into the self service plugins as well, wasnt aware of them

[mm2270]

Cool, I wasn't aware of the drag from browser to Dock trick, so I learned something today. Good to know! :)

[rmanly]

We call these "springers" at work and we use a lot of them and make them available via Self-Service.

Doing it via Casper Admin works like 97% of the time but there are some annoyances, like Admin not picking up on changes to the Dock as they happen (you have to quit and open it again to see new items).

dockutil has been a GREAT help to many people here.

https://github.com/kcrawford/dockutil

Check it out, it allows you to do things like.

dockutil --add http://www.apple.com --label 'Apple WWW' --after Documents --allhomes
dockutil --add http://www.apple.com --label 'Apple WWW' --after Documents --no-restart '/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj'