yamahito

If you’re administering a network of mac computers, you can’t underestimate the power of altering the default template.

The idea is simple: you can make sure that when new accounts are created, they already have the preferences set up exactly the way you need them. There are several scenarios where this technique can be used or where it presents an advantage:

Network Users - rather than time and hard drive consuming creation of users, customising the default profile will allow Mac OS X to create new accounts as soon as users are authenticated.

fast user churn - I administer some macbooks for a short citizen media course: the users share the macs extensively for a few months, at the end of which the machines need to be quickly prepared for new users. All I have to do is apply any patches, delete the old users, and make new user accounts. The new user accounts are already set-up with all the user preferences, guide documents and iTunes libraries ready to go.

the self-cleaning oven - Great for store demonstration machines or Kiosk-mode. You have computers that you think people are going to mess up. That’s fine, but you need a way to make sure the user account re-sets itself. Setting up a log-out script to delete the user’s files and recreate from the default template is a simple and powerful way of doing this.
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