In case you had not already heard Microsoft have had to release an update for all European users to prompt display a ballot screen about what version of browser they want to use (see below). This is one of the actions Microsoft had to do to comply with the EU anti-trust case. Microsoft have released article KB2019411 explaining how IT…

One of the common task that Group Policy administrators need to do is download and install the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) on their computer to allow them to make changes to Group Policy. This tool is by default not installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7. Below I first go through the Windows 7 and then the…

Recently, the SPECOPS Software roadshow "Changes, Challenges and Choices When rolling out Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7" made its way to the Microsoft Alpharetta office in the US. The featured speaker was Jeremy Moskowitz of GPanswers.com. During the break John Baker had the opportunity to sit down with Jeremy and get a quick interview. You can learn more…

This setting is another profile related setting however I think the focus is warranted as so many organisations use roaming profiles. This setting is called “Prevent Roaming Profile changes from propagating to the server” and can be found under  Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > User Profiles and like the previous setting work on Windows XP…

One of the most common setting that Group Policy is used for it so configure browser home pages settings. There are a number of ways that this can be done in Part 1 i am going to go thought the changing the Home Page setting using a native Group Policy. In Part 2 I will explain how to configure home…

This week I have decided to chose “Add the Administrator security group to roaming users profiles” as the setting of the week. This setting can be found under “Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > User Profiles” and applied to Windows XP / 2003 or later. This setting adds the administrator ACL to the users roaming profile…

In my previous article “How to use Group Policy to make USB drives read only on Windows XP” I showed you you could configure Windows XP to prevent users from writing to USB block level devices. However for some organisations just making drives read only is not enough I have heard stories of them having to resort to using hot…

There is an awesome new feature coming in Outlook 2010 call the Outlook Social Connector (a.k.a. People Pane) that allows you to view all the recent relevant status updates and emails from that person. This feature also enables third parties (i.e. Facebook, Twitter & Linkedin) to make connectors so that the view can contain information from a variety of sources….