TechEd 2006 and an Invitation to a UAC Chat
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.
June 22, 2006
1:00 P.M. Pacific Time
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