Managing client machines while also giving your users freedom to customize their machines as they want can be a bit tricky. On the one hand, you want to automate things as much as possible so users don’t have to be bothered with too many update prompts and other maintenance nuisances. On the other hand, you don’t want to automate things in a way that will confuse your users.

Jamie (our Dir. of IT) and I had a discussion about moving people from Microsoft Office 2011 to Microsoft Office 2016 and what that would look like. We didn’t want to just uninstall Office 2011 right away, especially since it’s the only thing MathType will reliably work with (in February, 2016, Design Science announced compatibility with Office 2016 for Windows, with a note that compatibility with Office 2016 for Mac would be coming “soon”—still hasn’t come over a year later, as of this writing). And, even though installing Office 2016 side by side with Office 2011 makes 2016 the default for Office files, we wanted to update the Dock icons, so people would launch Office 2016 applications instead of Office 2011 ones.

These were the situations we thought we’d encounter:

1. User has MathType installed. If that’s the case, we don’t want to touch the Dock icons. We have only a handful of MathType users, and most of them have already installed Office 2016 (previously an optional install through Munki’s Managed Software Center). Only one user asked about how to change the default application to be Office 2011’s instead of Office 2016’s.
2. User has only Office 2016 icons in the Dock. Nothing to do in this scenario, because everything’s cool already.
3. User has a mix of Office 2016 and Office 2011 icons in the Dock. If both Word 2011 and Word 2016 are in the Dock, we’re going to assume the user wants it that way, and we aren’t going to mess with it. But if Excel 2011 and Excel 2016 are in the Dock but only Word 2011 is in the Dock, we want to switch that up to be Word 2016.
4. User has only Office 2011 icons in the Dock. If this isn’t a MathType user, let’s switch these all up for Office 2016.
5. User has no Office icons in the Dock. Leave it alone. If the user doesn’t want shortcuts to Office, don’t put any in there.

The tricky thing about changing up Office icons in the Dock is that dockutil goes by name or bundleid to add, and both the name and the bundleid is the same for Office 2011 and Office 2016 applications.

So I wrote up a script that checks based on the dockutil –list output to see if the Dock icon is for 2011 or not. It may not work exactly for your organization, but you can see the logic in there, and it’s easily tweakable.