Elevated Privileges

[Mathew Eley]

Hi Guys,

This is a general question relating to elevated privileges. I have a
number of applications where once installed through munki and run as a
standard user they require admin rights to do a few other things. A
few examples are when Adobe Acrobat Pro wants to add a PDF printer. Or
when Endnote wants to add its plugin to word. I wanted to know if
anyone has had experience with these sorts of problems and if anyone
has a good solution?

Munki is working fantastically and installing our software correctly
but the applications themselves still require us to enter admin rights
before we deploy the machine.

[Pepijn]

As far as Acrobat Pro requiring admin privileges after a new install
and every update, one way to stop the self-heal process that triggers
it is described here:

http://osxdeployment.com/wiki/Suppress_Acrobat_9_Pro_Self-Heal

HTH,

Pepijn.

[Greg Neagle]

munki cannot generically solve the problem of poorly-designed installers. Repackaging is often the only immediate solution; the long-term solution is to complain to the software vendors and demand enterprise-friendly installation packages.

-Greg

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[Mathew Eley]

Thanks for that, yeah I agree the installers are poorly designed. I
have contacted the vendors on a few occasions but the general response
is "It's meant to work like that".

Thanks, Mat

[Rob Middleton]

For Endnote I have an extra package that installs the CWYW bundle into Word. This package needs to be updated with every update to Endnote.

It installs: /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Startup/Word/EndNote CWYW Word 2011.bundle

Endnote X4 Office 2011 plugin (custom package)
is an update_for:
Endnote X4
is an update_for:
Office 2011 Update
is an update_for:
Office 2011

Putting Office 2011 in "managed_installs" in a manifest installs all of these in order bottom to top.

The Endnote X4 package just includes the full contents of "/Applications/EndNote X4" no files need to go anywhere else.

The separate package for the Office plugin should source its files from "/Applications/EndNote X4/Cite While You Write/EndNote CWYW Word 2011.bundle" but write them to /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Startup/Word/EndNote CWYW Word 2011.bundle
(so that you can be sure you are repackaging the latest version of the plugin after updating the program)

That said - I'm encouraging people to use Mendeley (free, and far more powerful for workgroups) ... I've not yet got to the point I can deprecate Endnote as a sub-standard painful product.

Rob.

[Mathew Eley]

Awesome you're one step ahead of me. I've created the Endnote Package
the same way as you was just about to try to drop the bundle into
word. Great to hear it works, thanks for your reply.

[Per Olofsson]

Mmm EndNote. My Colleague has been struggling with 2011 + X4 over the past few weeks, and finally figured out most of it. Inline:

14 apr 2011 kl. 05.48 skrev Mathew Eley:
> On Apr 14, 1:22 pm, Rob Middleton <rrmiddle...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> For Endnote I have an extra package that installs the CWYW bundle into Word. This package needs to be updated with every update to Endnote.
>>
>> It installs: /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Startup/Word/EndNote CWYW Word 2011.bundle

NB: The path is localized (yay!), so e.g. the Swedish Office 2011 uses .../Office/Start/Word/...

> Awesome you're one step ahead of me. I've created the Endnote Package
> the same way as you was just about to try to drop the bundle into
> word. Great to hear it works, thanks for your reply.

We ran into the problem with EndNote not showing up in the Tools menu when we deployed the package, but of course it worked fine with a manual install. The toolbar shows up, so CWYW is running. It turned out to be related to the document gallery that launches on startup, and if you disable it with:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office "14\File New State\FNMSWD" -int 0

it'll work. MCX also works of course.

--
Per Olofsson, IT-service, University of Gothenburg

[Marnin Goldberg]

Can someone please share a working pkginfo file for Endnote x4?

Thanks for your time,

Marnin Goldberg
Technical Support Services
Office of Information Technology
Montclair State University