Manage Guest Account via Profile Manager

Question

I have enabled the guest account for all of the iMacs and Macbooks in my school. I would now like to use Profile Manager to trim down the dock for the Guest user, set a custom homepage for Safari and configure Safari to launch new windows with the homepage. I am struggling to find a tutorial for accomplishing this. Any tips?

Answer 1

This is not possible. Apple's Profile Manager is lacking in many areas, and this is one of them. Apple does not provide any tools or documentation for managing the guest account on multiple remote computers, or creating a profile to define and/or configure them.

Update: It has been about half a year since I posted this answer and in that time I have gained more insights into managing macs in a school environment. Here are my thoughts:

1. If you are managing student-facing macs in a school, your number one strategy should be to migrate to chromebooks. Cheaper, more secure, and a thousand times easier to manage.

2. If manage macs, you need to use something like Jamf to manage them. Apple Profile Manager is lacking.

3. Even with a mac management service like Jamf, using the Guest user account for students is a challenge. You will need to create your own "pseudo" guest user, and just manage it with scripts so it is always clean for the next student.

Answer 2

It looks like there is a way to make Guest account settings "persistent", it's just a bunch of settings files.

See this hint for how to get those settings files configured how you like them.

So you would copy the Guest preference files (once configured how you please), and then copy them to that User Template folder on all your deployed computers, so every Guest login starts with those settings.

I haven't used Profile Manager, but hopefully you have some simple way to copy the /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/ folder to all of your client computers. Please post if you find a good way to copy a system folder to all the Macs in your control.

(Also you'll want to delete everything inside the "Keychains" folder before deploying, or you'll get keychain popups at Guest login. See the comments in the aforementioned hint.)