10.10. Managing iTunes

iTunes provides the best, most seamless interface for users who use an iPhone or iPod touch. You don't have to use iTunes to interact with the device but it sure makes life much easier. If you choose to deploy iTunes as part of your mass deployment, whether it be to Windows or to Mac OS X clients (where it would be installed by default) there are some features that many organizations will certainly want to limit. Luckily, Apple allows you to manage various iTunes features for both Windows and Mac OS X clients. For Windows, there are a number of registry keys that can be used and for Mac OS X there is the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes.plist file.

Using the com.apple.iTunes.plist file you will have the ability to add the preference domain into the Workgroup Manager Managed Preferences (as covered in Chapter 7). Once added, you will be able to set a number of options to manage, including the following keys (which are self-explanatory for the most part):

• allowiTunesUAccess

• disableAppleTV

• disableAutomaticDeviceSync

• disableCheckForUpdates

• disableDeviceRegistration

• disableGeniusSidebar

• disableGetAlbumArtwork

• disableMusicStore

• disableOpenStream

• disablePlugins

• disablePodcasts

• disableRadio

• disableSharedMusic

• gamesLimit

• moviesLimit

• ratingSystemID

• restrictExplicit

• restrictGames

• restrictMovies

• restrictTVshows

• tvShowsLimit

If you have not been allowing your users to use iTunes because of a specific feature having been abused (Radio) then you can now limit many individual features of iTunes, and therefore allow users to still have access to less intrusive capabilities, such as iTunesU and Podcasts. Beware if you don't have a managed environment, and are considering pushing out a new com.apple.iTunes.plist file to your users. The feet will be a little tricky if you want to make sure to preserve any paired devices. Information about iPhones and AppleTVs can be found in this file, so it's best not to perform file drop's (common with package management tools, such as Jamf). If you do wish to push a preference into the file directly, rather than use MCX it will be best to utilize a shell script and the defaults command. For example, to disable iTunesRadio you could use the following:

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes disableRadio -bool true