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Note
UPDATE: July 1, 2020, 2:24 p.m. PDT: After months of (ahem) rigorous testing, I can confirm that setting your smartphone auto-lock to 'never' is a much simpler — and consistently successful. Turning on automatic updates is an important move towards keeping your Mac up to date. Here's the process at a glance: Click on the Apple menu in the upper left of the Finder bar. In this tutorial we will show you how you can enable or disable the automatic app updates feature in macOS. This guide is based on the newer Mac App Store found in macOS Mojave or later. Once this feature has been enabled apps that were downloaded from the Mac App Store will get updated as soon as they receive a new update.
Office 365 ProPlus is being renamed to Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise. For more information about this change, read this blog post.
Symptoms
By default, installations of Microsoft Office are configured to automatically update your Office installation when new updates are made publicly available. However, if you examine the Account section of the backstage, you may see that updates are disabled or that the command to manage updates is disabled or hidden. For example, the following figure indicates that updates are disabled in the backstage.
Cause
This issue occurs if updates have been manually disable or are managed through Group Policy settings.
Resolution
We recommend that you keep automatic updating enabled for Office installations because this configuration allows Office to automatically update with the latest fixes and security features. To re-enable automatic updates for Office, follow the steps below.
- Manually configure automatic updatesIf your Office installation is not managed by Group Policy, you can manually re-enable automatic updates by following these steps. If you cannot follow these steps because the Update Options control is disabled or missing, your updates are being managed by Group Policy.
- Start any program.
- On the File tab, select Account.
Note: In Outlook, select Office Account. - On the right side, select Update Options, and then select Enable Updates.
- If you are asked whether you want to let Microsoft Office make changes to your computer, select Yes.
- Automatic updates managed by Group PolicyWarningFollow the steps in this section carefully. Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Before you modify it, back up the registry for restoration in case problems occur.If you cannot follow the steps in the 'Manually configure automatic updates' section, this is because the Update Options control is disabled or missing due to a Group Policy. For example, the following figure shows the Update Options control when the Enable Updates option is hidden through a Group Policy:To examine the registry data that is associated with the Group Policy settings which control this feature, follow these steps:
- Start Registry Editor. To do this, take one of the following actions:
- In Windows 10 or Windows 8, press the Windows key + X, select Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then press Enter.
- In Windows 7 and Windows Vista, select Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press Enter. If you are prompted for an administrator password or for confirmation, type the password, or select Allow.
- Locate and then select the following registry key:
Note: If this key does not exist in your Registry Editor, see How to add the registry key via policy below.Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, Office 2019, and Office 2016HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEsoftwarepoliciesmicrosoftoffice16.0commonOfficeUpdateOffice 2013HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEsoftwareWow6432Nodemicrosoftoffice15.0commonOfficeUpdate- Examine the following registry values under the OfficeUpdate key:
- DWORD: EnableAutomaticUpdates
Values:
0 = automatic updates are disabled
1 = automatic updates are enabled - DWORD: HideEnableDisableUpdates
Values:
1 = hide the menu option to enable or disable automatic updates
0 = show the menu option to enable or disable automatic updates
- If you have any questions or concerns about these policy settings, see your domain administrator.
How to add the registry key via policy
The registry key is added automatically when you install ADMX/ADML files. To do this:
Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, Office 2019, and Office 2016
- Always download the LATEST admin templates to a location of your choice:Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) and Office Customization Tool for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, Office 2019, and Office 2016
- Select the Download button.
- Select either the x64 or the x86 build.
- Select Run and follow the prompts to install the software.
- Copy the *.admx files into the C:/Windows/PolicyDefinitions/ folder.
- Copy the *.adml files from the language-locale subfolder (for instance, 'en-US') into the respective language-locale folder under C:/Windows/PolicyDefinitions/.
Warning
The CBK-RGB01 is a software upgrade for the PMW-F3 Super 35mm Full HD Compact Camcorder. Ideal for high-end cinema, drama and commercials production, the CBK-RGB01 enables S-Log gamma mode, 3G-SDI output, Dual Link 444 RGB video output, custom user LUTs and pre-loaded LUTs (look up tables). A Dual Link HD-SDI option enables 10-bit RGB 23.98/25/29.97PsF or 10 bit 4:2:2 108050P/59.94P. Install the CBK-RGB01 according to the directions that come with your card. Determine whether you will be recording 4:4:4 RGB 1.5 or 3G RGB or 4:2:2 YUV, depending on your recording device. You can record 4:4:4 RGB only to a device that accepts Dual Link or 3G—at the moment. Installing cbk rgb01. CBK- RGB01 is a software upgrade option for the PMW-F3 Super 35mm CineAlta camcorder that allows S-Log gamma mode, 3G-SDI output, dual link HD-SDI video output, custom user LUTs (Look Up Tables) and pre-loaded LUTs. The dual link HD-SDI option enables 10-bit RGB 444 23.98/25/29.97PsF uncompressed external recording – ideal for integration. Installing Cbk-rgb01 Google Docs For Windows Xp Memory Barbra Streisand Rar Taproot Torrent Gift Descargar Microsoft Office 2003 Gratis Completo Para Windows Vista Horizon Intrepid Gx1260s Manual: Free Programs Utilities And Apps Aerofly Team Edition. Sony CBK-RGB01 CBK-RGB01 CBKRGB01. That's well sourced, Grug! You should never judge a codec purely by a number. Shoot a blue sky and pull both the 8bit and 10bit into premiere and add contrast. Price Pledge Price Pledge ensures we won't be tgb01 on price! The prices shown are an estimate based on the purchase of a single item with nothing.
Be sure to preserve the same language-locale PolicyDefinitions folder which is applicable to your environment.
Office 2013
- Go to the Office 2013 Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) and Office Customization Tool page.
- Select the Download button.
- Select either the x64 or the x86 build.
- Select Run and follow the prompts to install the software.
- Copy the *.admx files into the C:/Windows/PolicyDefinitions/ folder.
- Copy the *.adml files from the language-locale subfolder (for instance, 'en-US') into the respective language-locale folder under C:/Windows/PolicyDefinitions/.
Warning
Be sure to preserve the same language-locale PolicyDefinitions folder which is applicable to your environment.
After you copy the Administrative Template files to AD DS, you'll find the update policy settings under Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Office 2016 (Machine) > Updates in the Group Policy Management Console. You'll also find a description of how to configure each policy setting.
More information
For more information about configuring the update settings via GPO, see Configure update settings for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise.
Update: The workaround described below for disabling Squirrel updates specifically for Slack no longer works, as Slack’s Mac app as of 2.5.1 includes code to actively disable it. If you disagree (as I do), you can use the Slack /feedback command to send feedback to the developers.
![Disabling Auto Updates On Slack For Mac Disabling Auto Updates On Slack For Mac](/uploads/1/1/8/5/118503889/554604623.jpg)
Today in the Macadmins Slack #autopkg channel, my friend Ben mentioned he was seeing this update prompt for the non-Mac-App-Store version of Slack. It probably looked something like this:
Background
Dialogs like this are all too common for those who manage large numbers of computers, because of at least one of: 1) Users running the applications aren’t administrators and an application assumes they are, 2) An application assumes a user can modify files or the app bundle in /Applications, and that there may only be, in fact, one user using this application on the computer, or 3) An application has an auto-updater which is problematic to disable via a configuration profile or script.
Nearly every one of the 100+ applications we install across my org needs some additional configuration to disable a built-in auto-updater.
I use Munki to deploy all of our software, and typically one deploys apps to
/Applications
(when copied from disk images) using root:wheel
ownership, because it’s considered a “system” install, not a user install. This can be overridden to another user, but there’s an assumption that Munki is “managing” the installation of said application on the system.This “helper tool” dialog shown above happens when the auto-updater used by Slack knows that it’s not going to have the rights to modify the Slack app bundle (because it’s owned by
root
), and so it prompts for admin authorization to install a helper tool so that it can do its work with elevated privileges.Squirrel, Slack and Sparkle
Slack recently did a big rewrite using Electron, and it looks like they also adopted Squirrel for the auto-update component on both Mac and Windows. This stands to reason, as Squirrel is a companion project to the Atom editor, out of which the Electron project was born.
Squirrel is a bit like the next generation of Sparkle, supports Windows, and works using more server-side logic than Sparkle, which uses a simple RSS feed (which can still be generated using any server-side logic one wishes). But one nice thing about Sparkle is that there are documented preference keys which can be used to control its behaviour, and while this has to be done for each individual app, the behaviour and methodology of doing this is understood and predictable.
We’ve supported Atom in our computer labs for a while, and have been deploying a supported configuration option in Atom itself to disable update checks. Atom still leverages Squirrel, but uses the configuration to decide whether it will even bother to check for updates at all. I could not easily find any such setting in the Slack Mac app.
Continuous Updates
Some of these apps get updated a lot. Atom has had sevenstable releases over a three-week period last month (November). Yesterday I could open Slack and Atom on a managed desktop and get to work, but today it looks like this within a few seconds of opening the apps:
Atom and Slack apps both prompting for admin rights to install a helper tool.
Despite having great ease of automation thanks to tools like Munki and AutoPkg, we can never match pace with the upstream updates. We might turn around very quickly to get these updates out, but we can’t predict the future.
You also can’t easily test this if you’ve only got the latest version of an app. You’ve got to go find an out-of-date version (which apparently doesn’t take long) and install that to a test machine using the same tools. For example, using an admin user to just copy that old version to
/Applications
and then launch it won’t necessarily trigger the dialog, because its auto-updater will already have the rights to overwrite the app bundle, provided /Applications
still has the default group ownership of admin
.Use the Source
Squirrel’s open source, so that’s usually a good place to start looking. Typically in this case I’ll see if they have any open issues or pull requests that have to do with “update check” or something of that nature, and search the wiki (if there is one) or documentation. GitHub’s interface to immediately search the repo you’re currently browsing is very convenient.
In the end, I found this line - which was very easy, just searching for the word “disable.” This looks like an undocumented flag for debugging purposes. Apple’s APIs provide
getenv()
as part of the standard C library, so here they’re just checking for this DISABLE_UPDATE_CHECK
environment variable to be set (to anything) as a master disable switch.This is good enough for our purposes to see if we can disable the update check, at least for now.
Environment Variables and LaunchServices
Most of us are familiar with how to set an environment variable via the shell, but how do we set this on macOS so that it will be understood in the context of a GUI app? There are a few ways, although perhaps fewer ways than were possible in earlier versions of the OS, which have been removed for security reasons - and some other approaches have been documented but none of which look appealing.
LaunchServices supports adding environment variables within the context of a bundle, however. It’s possible to dig into the Slack Helper app, at:
/Applications/Slack.app/Contents/Frameworks/Slack Helper.app
and add the
LSEnvironment
key to its Info.plist
file, like so:I shy away from editing
Info.plist
files for “released” software if at possible – even though it would be trivial to do this on each install using a post-install script – mostly because I worry that it could at some point break signing, if the developers sufficiently tighten the code signature requirements for the relevant app bundle.launchctl setenv
Another potentially more interesting option that also doesn’t require us to modify any installation files, is to set this for any user as they log into the system, using
launchctl
. Again, the variable only needs to be set:/bin/launchctl setenv DISABLE_UPDATE_CHECK 1
After setting this in the terminal as the user launching the app, we can see whether it will try and initiate an update (and it doesn’t).
We can also check the state of these variables using
launchctl getenv <variable>
and unset them using (surprise) launchctl unsetenv <variable>
.To make this setting apply for all users (all the time), it must be done in the user’s context on every login. To manage running automatic login scripts on a system, we have tools like outset or LoginScriptPlugin. Managing login and startup scripts is such a common pattern for administering desktop computers that it’s something everyone should have in their toolkit anyway.
Setting this environment variable for a user will of course affect all apps using Squirrel (or at least this publicly-available verion), which may or may not be what you want.
Other methods?
I was hoping there might also be a way to set an environment variable as a user or managed preference in the context of the application itself, but still without modifying the bundle
Info.plist
, for example:defaults write com.tinyspeck.slackmacgap.helper LSEnvironment -dict-add DISABLE_UPDATE_CHECK -string 1
Disabling Auto Updates On Slack For Mac Shortcut
But no such luck. Apple has some overview documentation about what options are available for setting an envionment variable, but it’s from 2009 and doesn’t seem to mention
launchctl
. The launchctl *env
commands seem to be available going back at least as far as OS X Mavericks.Disable Slack Auto Update
Get Involved
What’s great about products using open-source components like Electron and Squirrel, is that someone like me can go look at the source code and learn how it works, and propose or submit my own improvements. I’ve done that here, because I don’t like the idea of relying on an undocumented flag like what I’ve shown above.
Disabling Auto Updates On Slack For Macbook
This idea about pitching in goes for any issues you find with software you want to support in your environment but something about the application’s design poses a problem. Mac installer packaging and versioning is a common problem area, and often you don’t need to know how to write code in a “real” programming language to help an open source project fix that.
Disabling Auto Updates On Slack For Mac Osx
I’d encourage any Mac sysadmin who’s eager to get some coding practice or learn an unfamiliar language or framework, and to participate in an open source project, to consider offering up such improvements yourself or at least begin the discussion with software developers, who often aren’t aware that these issues exist for larger environments.