Apple don’t like Mac admins tinkering with the dock. For Apple, the dock is a space for the user to customise and tweak to their heart’s desire, not for some technical overlord to control.
But in a school setting, setting the contents of the dock is actually really handy. If people are moving around the school and could potentially log into any given Mac, having all the dock items in the same place makes it more familiar for staff.
Unfortunately, Jamf Pro doesn’t really offer quite the right tools for doing this. It is possible to add and remove dock items using ‘policies’, but this is prone to error and still allows users to move things around however they like. Or you can create a ‘profile’ for the dock, but only if it includes default apps and not things like Keynote, Word or Slack.
Thankfully, Michael Page has created ‘Dock Master’, an online tool that allows for the creation of customisable dock profiles with whichever apps your heart desires. Just set it up as you want, download the profile and then upload that to your MDM of choice.
When Ventura was released, I started upgrading some Macs to it and then noticed that Safari would have a little alias arrow in the left corner of the app icon in the dock. Very strange!
After a little bit of digging, I discovered that this was because Safari actually now lives in
System/Cryptexes/App/System/Applications/Safari.app
and not in the Applications folder at all. So once I put in the correct path in Dock Master, it all worked fine. Yay!
Primary ICT 