Bug in Apple Profile Manager

[maniac]

Thought I'd share this, as it's had me head scratching for a while.

 

We use Apple Profile manager to roll out settings to our iPads, and also our Macs. I've been having massive issues with the groups not synchronizing properly and users only appearing in the Domain Users and Everyone group - not helpful when trying to roll our different settings to different groups of users. I've been troubleshooting this issue a while, and even resorted to wiping profile manager and starting again, achieving the same results as before.

 

I then stumbled across this post on the Apple forums.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6072170

 

How I'd never seen it before when searching for this issue I don't know, but miss it I did and only stumbled across it this evening when doing some more research - like everything it depends what you actually type into the search engine I guess.

 

Essentially my problem was caused the display name and common name in AD being different, we add "STUDENT" on the end of the display names of all our students to make it easy to identify students and staff on the global address list in Exchange. This difference was causing profile manager to reject the user synchronization and although it displays the user, it doesn't read things like their group membership properly. Putting the two the same has magically resolved this problem and Profile Manager now works for me like a charm, I never thought it would. Whether apple will ever fix this bug who knows, but this is a working solution.

 

If you need to change these in bulk, I recommend using AD modify, it did my entire student user base in about 2 minutes - I'd be lost without that little utility.

 

Hope this helps someone as this issue had me stumped for ages and I was on the brink of ditching profile manager for another service.

 

Mike.

Edited September 9, 2014 by maniac