Managing Mobile Accounts

Abstract

A very common use for managed preferences on Mac OS X is to manage mobile accounts. In fact, it was precisely this need that caused one of your humble authors to implement Local MCX in his organization—he had previously managed a lot of things through the use of various scripts that directly manipulated preference files. But a desire to automate the creation of mobile accounts and the enforcement of FileVault protection for these accounts led him to implement managed preferences. This then trickled down and replaced most of the homegrown management scripts used earlier.