Microsoft Employees May Lose Admin Rights

daria42 writes "As Microsoft moves its internal desktop systems to Windows Vista, the company is contemplating whether to change a long running tradition and take away admin rights from its employees in order to improve security." From the article: "'We haven't made that final determination yet. We would like to absolutely look at scenarios where we can look at elements of User Access Control -- that is the feature in Vista -- so that we can start moving in that direction ... It is a tough balance and every company has to decide what is right for them,' said Estberg. However, Estberg said that for the moment, the company will continue to leave the responsibility of installing software with its employees."

Comments

Eat your own dog food

[mwvdlee]

"Eat your own dog food".

If Microsoft's access rights model isn't good enough for their own purposes, it isn't good enough for the rest of the world either.

If they were truely confident that it works as they claim it does, they should have had their employees in a more secure and restricted environment years ago.

Excellent Idea

[Whatsisname]

Yes, having the employees run as 'regular' users would be a terrific idea. All the problems that limited user accounts have now would be encountered by those with the most ability to fix them.

Won't fly

[Utopia]

With a huge percentage of the people being developers, these people need full control over their system.
I don't see how they can even implement this scheme.

May be they can take the admin rights from their Managers computers.

Give them average-sized monitors too, dammit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, make them work in monitors the size the average office supplies -- 15" or 17" where I work.

I'm so damn tired of apps that open big windows needlessly in the middle of the screen (MSWord's 'find' for example) covering whatever it is you wanted to actually operate on -- because some programmer had a 29" monitor -- or two -- to work in and never thought about fitting stuff into a real user's working screen.

Open find. Drag stupid window off the text area. Find. Damn, window moved back to the middle. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sure, the IT department could supply larger monitors. But those are commodities and they're saving their budget for bells and whistles to impress top management.

Re:"Unusual practice" ... wtf.

[EvilSS]

Are they Microsoft Applications or third party apps? Everyone is quick to blame MS for this but in reality it's usually the fault of the application developers that can't follow Microsoft's guidelines for writing software. 99.9% of the time it is the result of one of the following:

1. Storing user information in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER (even MS is guilty of this with their TS licenses)
2. Writing files to the program directory instead of to the user profile, temp, home drive or other user writable location
3. Writing files to C:\ (this is just inexcusable and lazy)
4. Some other bonehead move by the developers (such as registering components on run instead of during the install, trying to store files in winnt, using freaking INI files!)

[insert rant about under-trained programmers and lack of proper software engineers here]

If the programmers would actually learn how Windows works most of the "x software package requires admin rights" could be avoided.