In Place Upgrade Issue

[jamesdurler]

Hey everyone,

At my organisation we are currently offering in place upgrades to Yosemite / El Capitan. This works perfectly however I have noticed a side effect to the upgrade process.

As part of the process it looks like the default user template is cleansed - therefore any preferences / customisations made to the machine will be lost if a new user logs in.

I have a few ideas how I could get round this - re-deploy apps or maybe capture the user template before the upgrade takes place and then restore once its taken place.

I was wondering how you guys were dealing with this issue? May be a better more simple way of addressing this.

Thanks in advance

[stevewood]

@jamesdurler TBH, the best answer is, don't mess with the user template. Instead of adjusting the template, create scripts/config profiles/packages that handle the customization that you are trying to accomplish. Changes to the user template, as you have found, are not guaranteed to last through an upgrade.

But, if you have to change the template, the easiest thing to do, IMO, would be to make the changes to a machine that is at the same level, so El Cap if upgrading to El Cap, and then package the template up and deploy after upgrade. You could use a Smart Group to catch machines that upgrade (perhaps a dummy receipt on a machine as it upgrades) and then scope a policy to deploy that PKG of the template to those machines.

[charles_hitch]

So what we do is create a package for the settings we want in User Template. As part of the policy that kicks off the in-place upgrade we cache this package and also install a launch daemon with a first boot script. Then when the system is rebooting after the upgrade the first boot script installs the User Template. May sound a little complicated but it has worked really well for us the past two upgrades.