Setting Safari Preferences for first time users

[a_holley]

We have a new site opening in a few weeks and we are hoping to get the computers set up using DEP.

We have our pre-stage all set up and working, but now come the details. I'm currently stuck on getting the Safari defaults set correctly.

I've done some reading around, but a lot of the information seems a bit old.

Basically, I have 3 things I want to set:
Home page
Bookmarks
Plug-in settings.

I want to FUT with these settings.

I have tried using a snapshot, but that doesn't seem to pick up the changes. I am wary of using a New and Modified snapshot as that has overwritten our Time Machine settings in the past. I have also grabbed the plist file and chucked it into a DMG I was building with some other things. That seems to have changed the plug-in settings, but it defaulted the bookmarks and didn't change the home page at all.

What method are people using to deploy these settings for their DEP process? We don't want to take control of these things, just set them for the first time. If users change these settings, so be it.

Thanks!

[daniel_behan]

Your best bet is a configuration profile. You can take a clean machine and configure Safari the way you want. Convert your Safari Preferences file to xml "/usr/bin/plutil -convert xml1 /path/to/file.plist" Then install Server.app and upload that into Profile Manager to see what the settings will be. At that point you can either upload that config into Casper or use what you see in profile manager to make a custom settings profile in Casper.