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TechEd 2006 and an Invitation to a UAC Chat

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Many of the UAC team members attended TechEd 2006 this week in Boston. I really had a great time talking to customers about the UAC project, how the technology works, how the policy options affect its operation, and what direction Microsoft is taking it.

The aspect that surprised me the most this week was that well over 50% of the enterprise customers are already moving to Standard User on XP. That means they are already pushing on their vendors to ship good Standard User applications and they are already inventorying and deploying applications (or pushing “staged” images) to their desktops. I validated this data point during my talk by asking for a show of hands. Almost all of the people that said “I manage enterprise desktops” also said “we are already trying to get to Standard User.”

I have had two customers so far ask me “I am already locked down Standard User, why should I care about Vista”. We have three answers here:

· We fixed the operating system. You can change Power Management, change the timezone etc. And we “auto fix” many of the applications.

· You can push enterprise policy to enable scenarios such as “my laptop users can install any printer from HP… or any printer”.

· You can push enterprise policy to enable your Standard Users to install ActiveX controls from your business partners.

That was the right answer, as these two scenarios are both very important and very expensive in Windows XP today.

In addition, Wei and his team staffed a UAC Lab along with the App Compat team to train developers on how to look for, debug, and fix UAC issues. The attendees are given a broken demo app to demonstrate issues including incorrect version check, session 0, MIC, UAC, and other standard user related issues. By mid-week, we already had over 1000 out of the total 12000+ attendees participated in the lab which is of 45 minutes duration.

For the people that did not make it to TechEd 2006, we want to have a chat session to take your questions online. We will staff the chat session with our developers, testers and program managers, so we should be able to field any question you have.

Please join us on Thursday, 1pm to 2pm Pacific time (4pm-5pm Eastern). Here is the chat info:

User Account Control in Windows Vista
Please join the User Account Control (UAC) team in a candid Q&A about UAC in Windows Vista. Ask us your tough questions, such as those about application compatibility, UAC Group Policy management, and application deployment.

Add to Calendar

June 22, 2006
1:00 P.M. Pacific Time

Enter

If this link doesn’t work, you can find the chat session on one of the following sites:

https://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/default.mspx

https://www.microsoft.com/communities/chats/default.mspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/

thanks,

Steve

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2006
    The UAC Team would like to invite you for a Q&A Chat with their team. Here is the details: User Account
  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2006
    "We fixed the operating system.  You can change Power Management, change the timezone etc.  And we “auto fix” many of the applications."

    The applications aren't Microsoft's responsibility to fix... unless of course they're Microsoft applications.  The developers should fix their broken stuff themselves.  They've had, what, six years to do this on Win2K?

    And why not fix Power Management, changing the time zone, and so forth on XP?  A lot of admins loosen just enough security to work around this already.  Or is this a selling point for Vista?  "Windows Vista.  We fixed the operating system."  Nice marketing slogan.
  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 20, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2006
    Aaron: is it intended to be guaranteed that an app, running under UAC, that knows the Adminstrator password cannot use any admin privileges without a prompt? I didn't get an answer to this when I asked on a previous blog entry. Note that UAC and UIPI are not sufficient for this unless they also affect network protocols that use Windows account passwords for authentication.
  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2006
    can anyone demonstrate the UIPI concept programatically,
     that is i want one programe to run in user mode other in administrative mode and the
    user mode process cannot send msg to administrative process plzzzzzzzzz