All posts by CJ "JAMF Jr." Johnson

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Mac Office 2016 Upgrade Tonight July 5th, What to Expect

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Tonight, July 5th at approximately 5:30 pm the Office 2016 upgrade policy will be pushed via Casper. This upgrade is only going to the machines that have either Yosemite or El Capitan, and have Office 2011 currently installed.

What to Expect:

  • The policy will uninstall the existing version (Office 2011), then proceed to install Office 2016.
  • Included in this install is creating an alias for the Microsoft Auto Update application that will live in the Applications Directory on the macs.
  • It will remove the dock icons for the old Office applications.
  • Lync 2011 will remain on the machine since its replacement has yet to be released.

Known Issues:

  • A very sporadic issue is where Office loses its license and then asks the user to sign in to Office 365. The fix for this is to run the Office 2016 serializer package that is built into the Office 2016 installer on software. I went ahead and extracted it out and created it as a stand-alone policy in Casper. I also included the package at the end of the upgrade policy, in the hopes to mitigate this licensing issue.
  • Refer to http://itknows.oregonstate.edu/?p=6149

If you receive questions from users about the push, you can direct them to me. If users are experiencing regular issues, please consult the Microsoft support site for Office 2016, or our friend, Ol’ Reliable Google.

Below is the list of machines that are scoped to be upgraded.

Machines being upgraded to Office 2016 for Mac

The machines will pick up the policy whenever they check in after 5:30. Which theoretically they should be checking in every 15 minutes.

If you have any questions, let me know!

-C.J.

Base, Bench, Community Network, Field

Changes to Build Bench Build Procedures

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Due to reports of build inconsistencies on mac computers. The Build Bench Process has been changed. So what is changing?

  • Macs are moving back to being imaged by Deploy Studio. The process is now essentially a two step process for the basic build.  1: Image. 2: Install casper. I made it as easy and foolproof as I could. With the move to deploy studio, all of the enrollment policies in Casper have been changed so they do not install software automatically. This will make the execution of the quick add package a lot quicker.
  • The builds will no longer include department specific user templates as certain updates have changed the process and now require a complete overhaul to continue it. Which is too much maintenance for something so small.
  • I spoke to Angela, Lucas, Sam and Patrick and Office 2016 for mac is now on the image. Through our testing it has been good, and we feel it is important to get the online archive functionality to our mac users.
  • For macs to be joined to domain: As a reminder, they should only be joined in special circumstances where there are a lot of users using the machine. The machine should only be joined to the ONID domain. You can use the casper policy “CN – Onid – Domain Bind”
  • For Field Techs building macs in their free time. We ask that it be done at the build bench using deploy studio for consistency sake. Using our process completely. Once the rest of CS moves to Milne we can have a couple of ports available for the field techs that can access deploy studio. But as for now all mac computers should be built using the deploy studio process in the Milne 120 build bench.

Also as a reminder: iWork is to be only installed on machines after Late 2013. There is a smart group in casper that indicates whether or not they are eligible for free iWork. If their machine is not in that smart group, the customer must purchase the software from the app store. Under no circumstances should we be installing the software on machines that are not eligible.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to let me know!

Bench

Apple build process update!

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Upon updating the documentation for phasing out deploy studio I realized just how much time deploy studio actually saves us. So we will continue using it and with the current build process. One minor adjustment is the standard image is now Yosemite, not Mavericks.

I have plugged deploy studio back in and am changing the cyder entry now. So expect it to be up and running…. Sometime later today.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

Cheers,

-CJ