Starting with Santa 2026.1, North Pole Security now includes a menu bar item for Santa:

That can be helpful for seeing easily what version of Santa you have installed or to do a sync without having to type sudo santactl sync.

But you may, as administrators in IT and Security, not want to have the menu bar item enabled, for whatever reason.

In the configuration documentation, it says:

EnableMenuItem
Default:true
If true, Santa will show an item in the macOS menu bar to allow syncing and management of temporary monitor mode by default. Users are able to show/hide the menu item from the About window.

So you can deploy this in your Santa configuration profile:

   <key>EnableMenuItem</key>
   <false/>

But, apparently, if the user has ever used the menu bar item to toggle the menu bar itself on or off, then it’s now in the user’s control instead of your control as admin.

Fortunately, there’s an undocumented hidden key you can use to just disregard the user preferences and thus force the menu bar to be off, so you’d have this in your Santa configuration profile instead:

   <key>EnableMenuItem</key>
   <false/>
   <key>EnableMenuItemUserOverride</key>
   <false/>

That will make it so the menu bar item will definitely not display at all, whether the user ever toggled it off and on again or not.

Special thanks to Russell Hancox for mentioning on the MacAdmins Slack the existence of this undocumented key, and thanks to Johnny Brown for confirming that setting that key does, in fact, force the menu bar off.