iTunes is cool. But there are some features that many organizations want to limit as when they are used by a large number of people they can become problematic. Apple allows you to manage iTunes for 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, or more importantly the ability to Add the aforementioned file into the Workgroup Manager Managed Preferences. Once added you will be able to set a number of options to manage, including the following (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 access iTunes because of a specific feature having been abused (ie – Radio) then you can now limit the features of iTunes and therefore allow users to still have access to other features, such as iTunesU and Podcasts. Considering pushing out a new com.apple.iTunes.plist file? That could 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 be careful before you perform a file drop. If you do wish to push a preference into the file directly, rather than use mcx then consider instead using defaults. For example, to disable iTunesRadio you could use the following:
defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes disableRadio -bool true
