AD Mobile Accounts making Office 2016 Angry

[DJLC]

So either macOS 10.11 or 10.12 came with some change that resulted in a tweak to the way it names the home folder of an Active Directory mobile account. In the past, the home folder of an AD account would simply be the username. Lately, however, macOS has been naming the home folder DOMAIN\username. This didn't really concern me until...

We recently upgraded to Office 365. When I install Office 2016 on our staff MacBooks, Word constantly complains that it can't save the temp file or the Normal template. I discovered that manually renaming the home folder to JUST the username + tweaking the Advanced Settings on the mobile account in System Prefs to the updated home folder path resolves that issue. In a handful of cases, I'm also seeing Google Chrome fail to open downloaded PDF files, and this fix also resolves that issue.

Is there some reason macOS has decided to start putting "DOMAIN\" in my home folder paths? Clearly the OS doesn't like that backslash, but it's the one doing it!

 

[chrfr]

So either macOS 10.11 or 10.12 came with some change that resulted in a tweak to the way it names the home folder of an Active Directory mobile account. In the past, the home folder of an AD account would simply be the username. Lately, however, macOS has been naming the home folder DOMAIN\username.

This is a change that someone who's managing your AD binding would have changed. Home folders here are still just named as the short username, just as always, even in 10.13.6.

 

[DJLC]

This is a change that someone who's managing your AD binding would have changed. Home folders here are still just named as the short username, just as always, even in 10.13.6.

Also me, haha! Anything easy I can do in Windows Server to fix that? We're on Server 2012 R2. This probably happened when I set AD up to sync with Azure for Office 365 logins. Our AD domain doesn't match our email domain, so I had to add an additional domain in AD. Otherwise they would've had to login to 365 with this big weird username.

 

[chrfr]

Also me, haha! Anything easy I can do in Windows Server to fix that? We're on Server 2012 R2.

It most likely is related to your binding settings on the Mac, not the server. On my systems, in Directory utility I have only the following options checked:
Create mobile account at login (This automatically turns on "Force local home directory on startup disk"
Default user shell /bin/bash
Under Mappings and Administrative, I have nothing enabled.
What settings do you have?

 

[DJLC]

It most likely is related to your binding settings on the Mac, not the server. On my systems, in Directory utility I have only the following options checked:
Create mobile account at login (This automatically turns on "Force local home directory on startup disk"
Default user shell /bin/bash
Under Mappings and Administrative, I have nothing enabled.
What settings do you have?

I just added a screenshot of my AD user account tab to the post above. And attached to this one are shots of my settings in Directory Utility.

Thanks!

 

[chrfr]

I just added a screenshot of my AD user account tab to the post above. And attached to this one are shots of my settings in Directory Utility.

Thanks!

I would assume it's "Use UNC path..." that's doing it.