Managed Preference Profiles no Office 2016 applications listed

[tcandela]

I have never setup a Managed Preference Profile policy within the JSS, I just was curious so I've started to take a look at it. Is this what everybody calls MCX profiles ?

Why do the payloads for the Office applications Word, Excel, PPoint, have entries for versions 2008 to 2011? what about Office 2016 ?

[Josh_Smith]

@tcaldana MCX is the old way of doing things, Apple started replacing that functionality with Configuration Profiles around 10.7/10.8. 2016 is not a good time to start using them!

If you'd like to see an example of how you can create a custom Configuration Profile to modify the behavior of Office 2016 then take a look at https://github.com/talkingmoose/Outlook-Exchange-Setup-5/wiki/Create-a-configuration-profile

[mm2270 · Accepted solution]

Managed Preferences = MCX, so yes, that is MCX you're looking at. Unless you're needing to manage legacy OS X systems, like 10.7, 10.8, etc, you should be using Configuration Profiles.
Technically, Apple declared MCX deprecated as far back as around 10.8, but we still continued to use it all the way up until 10.9. It wasn't 100% reliable under 10.9, but mostly still worked. But when 10.10 came along, that was the final nail in the coffin for MCX, and we needed to switch to Configuration Profiles.

Since Office 2016 requires 10.10 and up to run, you're not going to see anything Office 2016 related in there. There's no point, because the OS required to install and use Office 2016 isn't compatible with straight MCX anymore.

Hope that helps.

[tcaldana]

I think you meant tcaldela and not @tcaldana

[KSchroeder]

AHH....well good to know that MCX is deprecated. I was starting to setup several of them for managing MS AutoUpdate, OneDrive, Chrome, and others. They do still seem to work (including on Sierra). Looks like it is now time to add plist to my nascent Mac skilset! :)