At Ease: The Scrapbook and "file doesn‘t exist" error

Our school is running an At Ease network, and we been experiencing some difficulty with PowerPoint in the Panels and Restricted Finder environments.

Whenever a user attempts to insert a bit of clip art into a PowerPoint document, they get an error message indicating that the file doesn't exist or that it may have been moved or deleted. This issuedisappears when the same user is logged into the full Finder. Is there any way to get around this issue?
Many multimedia and presentation applications (such as Microsoft PowerPoint), draw upon the functionality of the Scrapbook as a means of importing data, especially images, into a document. The file is placed into the Scrapbook, which serves as a sort of holding tank for the data until it can be inserted into the document. However, the Scrapbook is not automatically made available to At Ease users, with the result that the application will look to the Scrapbook without success.

There are several approaches to resolving this issue. Your choice of solution will depend on the your network security need:

More compatibility, less security:
Enable global sub-launching via the System Security panel in At Ease Administration:



Figure 1: Global Sub-launching

The primary drawback of enabling global sub-launching is that, depending on how knowledgeable they are, your users will be able to access just about any application available on the network.

More security, less compatibility:
Instead of allowing any application to sub-launch another application, make the Scrapbook available to your users. You may make the Scrapbook available to all users, or you may restrict access to specific workgroups.

To make the Scrapbook available globally:
Select the Scrapbook in Application Preferences, which can be found under the Options menu of At Ease Admin. Check the box which permits other applications to launch the Scrapbook. If the Scrapbook does not appear in your list of applications, click on the Add Application button and navigate to the Scrapbook, which is typically found in the Apple Menu Items folder in the System Folder.



Figure 2: Scrapbook sub-launching

To make the Scrapbook available to a specific workgroup:
Open up the Edit Workgroup panel within At Ease Admin. Click on the Items button, and select Add Application, and navigate to the Scrapbook, which is typically found in the Apple Menu Items folder in the System Folder.



Image 3: Add Scrapbook to Workgroup

At this point, the application should function as expected.

Published Date: Feb 18, 2012