Red / Green Underlining continued: Using Preferences to set IE settings like preference, or like policy

How to: use F5-F6-F7-F8 to control what settings you want pushed out, lock down the Advanced tab with a preference setting to act like policy

 

Last time I talked about how to use F5-F8 keys to use the glanularity that we love so much about Preferences. Now, time for an example of using GP Preferences, then creating a policy that takes advantage of the fine-tuned nature of Preferences and locks it down with Poliy. 

Say you only want to push out a Preference that configured the Phishing filter settings in the Advanced tab in IE7. Create a new IE7 Preference item, navigate over to the Advanced tab: there are all the settings you could manage. Try lighting them all up; F5 turns them all green, F8 turns them all red. End up with F8 for now, keeping them all ignored (Red), as you’re only looking to set up one setting. F6 and F7 are sensitive to the most recently touched setting, so be precise with what you want. Select the check box for turn on automatic website checking, now press F6. Green circles! Just that setting now has green circles, and all the rest are red. You can flip back and forth here with F7 to set it to red again, F6 to bring it back, etc. If you select another setting, F6 and F7 will be concentrated on that new setting. There! Now you have configured a setting and controlled that exactly the one you specified will be paid attention to.

 

 

 

Now we can build on this using Policy as well. This will keep our Preference settings and lock them down so that users cannot make changes to it. So you’re setting a user preference (that you wouldn’t be able to dictate with policy), but enforcing it to be unchangeable like policy. In the example above, we set one setting in the Advanced tab of IE7. That’s the Preference part. Do a gpupdate and you’ll see that setting is now set, but users can change it back to whatever they want, a true preference.

 

Now find the Policy setting that says “Do not let users change Advanced Tab in IE”. Gpupdate again, and you’ll see that the Advanced tab is greyed out, preventing the User from changing anything, but the setting within that is what was described in the Preference. The Preference setting is now locked in and unchangeable, like Policy! Sweet.

 

Hope this helps,

 

 Lilia Gutnik

 Program Manager