Enabling the “Hide On My Computer folders” checkbox in Outlook’s General Preferences

One of the more useful (to me) features in Outlook is the ability to hide the On My Computer directories in Outlook. There’s a checkbox in Outlook’s preferences, in the General section, that enables it. It’s also possible to enable this using a defaults command:

defaults write com.microsoft.Outlook HideFoldersOnMyComputerRootInFolderList -bool true

Also, because you can set this with a defaults command, it’s possible to manage this with MCX:

Domain: ~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Outlook

Key: HideFoldersOnMyComputerRootInFolderList

Value: True (to enable the checkbox) or False (to de-select it)

Absolute Manage Custom information items

I’ve worked with Absolute Manage (formerly LANrev) and one of my favorite things about it was that I could set up custom inventory entries (called Custom Information Items) using scripts. This allowed me to poll my managed machines for specific information and to build Absolute Manage smart groups that used that information to add or remove machines to and from that smart group.

Below the jump, I’ve posted some of the scripts I’ve used in the past to look for encrypted Macs, check which machines had which accounts (based on the presence of a home folder in /Users), and whether or not a Mac has the Mac NetWorker client or the Atempo LiveBackup client installed.