How to disable MAU altogether?

[mthakur]

Paging @pbowden ....

How can I disable or suppress MAU from launching altogether?

Even if I set HowToCheck = Manual, I'm still seeing MAU launching every 12 hours.

If I set UpdateCheckFrequency = 0 or UpdateCheckFrequency = 999999 (i.e. very large number) will that suppress MAU from launching altogether?

We push our updates on a controlled schedule, and we do not want users being hassled with nuisance alerts that they just have to dismiss anyway.
Thank you for any ideas!

[hrhnick]

You could uninstall it all together probably, it’s not a required component. You’d want to set up an EA to look for it probably since it’s hidden in Application Support, then scope a script to do an uninstall removing the app and launchdaemons.

Also might want to configure new deployments to skip it all together during install with either a configuration profile or a choices.xml file.

[talkingmoose]

@mthakur, unless there's a recently introduced issue that I'm not aware of, setting the HowToCheck key to Manual should be enough. Are you deploying any other keys in your profile? If so, remove them and see how that works.

And check for typos too for the domain, key and value. They should be:

com.microsoft.autoupdate2
HowToCheck
Manual

Also, be sure you haven't created any policies to use a script to call MAU.

[hcgtexas]

We played around with a couple of different ways to disable it in my org. You can uninstall the component, as hrhnick said, which is a nice no work around way to disable it.

You can put the process in the "Restricted Applications" section of Jamf, which will let you keep the files updated if that's a thing you want, and give you the option of giving a popup for user notification if you want.

What we ended up doing was changing the file rights to not allow anyone to open it. This keeps the files there so we don't have to worry about anyone re-installing it and changing the configs, and allows us to go in and re-allow it for troubleshooting if we need to.

[obi-k]

Anyone able to stop the "End of Support for Office 2016" notifications? Users have to click on that every now and then to get rid of the prompt.

[tomt]

MAU has become incredibly annoying over the last year. I really don't want to rip it out though.

[joethedsa]

@mvu, I'm with you. I'm trying to suppress these messages too. I suspect there is a configuration profile that could be installed for a quick fix. These messages seem similar to the "Required Data Notice" popups that started to creep up out of know where about this same time last year. The thread from https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/32686/microsoft-required-data-notice-pop-up might be good building blocks to create a config profile. I unfortunately have zero to little experience with configuration profiles so am hoping someone could contribute to a quick fix.

[robb1068]

Starting last month (June), our users starting seeing messages from MAU that a deadline has been set for updates and they need to quit and update. The "Automatically keep Microsoft Apps up to date" button was ticked on manually before handing off the Mac (pre-JAMF deployment), but we don't have any ongoing policies or config profiles to enforce the deadline. Just a little alarming that the update deadline is possibly being enforced outside the organization.

So now I'm testing a configuration profile that will disable auto updates. I'm curious if anyone else is doing the same and what values you used for the "UpdateCheckFrequency" and "UpdateDeadline.DaysBeforeForcedQuit"

Thanks!