Easily Managing Your Lockdown Features

Posted By J.T. Kimbell
Program Manager

Today I’m going to share a demo of something pretty awesome with you guys. Not as awesome as the recently announced Microsoft Surface tablet, but it’s still pretty cool. On Monday, we gave an overview of all the lockdown features on Windows Embedded Standard 8, and today I’m going to be showing you how you can easily manage those lockdown features by using the Unified Configuration Tool (UCT), a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in.

UCT comes as part of the Windows Embedded Standard 8 toolkit and can be installed by running emblockSetup_amd64.msi or embblockSetup_x86.msi (depending on your developer machine’s architecture). Download our second Community Technology Preview (CTP2) to try it out. With the tool, the lockdown features on your Windows Embedded devices can be remotely or locally managed by graphical user interface. From changing your custom shell for Shell Launcher to selecting what processes to block with Dialog Filter, there is a lot that UCT lets you configure.

With some help from Brendan Rempel, a developer working on UCT, I created the following video that shows you UCT in action and teaches you more about it.

On Friday, Brendan will provide a deeper dive into the lockdown features, showing you how to really take advantage of the features programmatically. Is there anything else you want to learn about? Anything else we can provide an overview of to help you out? Let us know in the comments below.