Microsoft have posted a KB article to manually create ADM and ADMX files which will allow you to manage the search providers in Internet Explorer 7’s Search Box.
This can be very useful for admins who only want certain sites to be searchable across their domain (such as an intranet!)
After when deploying Internet Explorer 7 around your site through a service such as WSUS, there are immediate considertaions that have to be dealt with. The main one being configuring settings for IE7.
It is possible to download the Internet Explorer Administration Toolkit (IEAK), but when dealing with IE7 that has been installed on computers automatically – that’s not what you want to hear.
After installing IE7 on one of our servers, I went to the group policy to see if there were any new settings. As such, the important ones didn’t seem to exist:
Obviously, there are a number of settings that administrators would want to take control of.
Thankfully, there are two ways of getting these settings in group policy. The first is to simply install Windows Vista as a workstation and use the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC.MSC) which is bundled with Vista. This has all of the IE settings.
If you don’t have a Vista system, you can download an up-to-date MSI of the Administrative Templates for Internet Explorer 7 for Windows. This will install the inetres.adm file in the specified folder.
To apply it to the machine you are working on (pre-Vista, of course), copy the ADM file to %systemroot%\inf. Run gpedit.msc and navigate to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer.
Some of the useful settings are:
Using the group policy configuration is a much more practical way of configuring IE7 than the registry hacks that I’ve seen floating around where people are struggling to find the group policy settings for IE7.
There are there! Honest!
Sometimes, there’s usually a dodgy network card that doesn’t seem to want to work too nicely in Windows XP on a domain.
The typical situation is that Group Policy fails to load when logging on or starting up. This can cause a lot of grief, and I usually find that this registry key does the trick:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/239924/en-us
Once applied, the network card may take a while (about 10 seconds) to prepare network connections. If this is the case, then you should find that the system is now working properly. Horah!
Deploying Java across a network was a little touch-and-go today. I had a point where Windows XP hung during the Installing Managed Software phase.
After waiting for about 20 minutes, I decided that the installation had failed. After removing the package from software deployment section of Group Policy, I rebooted the PC and ran the ‘Last Known Good Configuration’ startup option.
Thankfully, the next boot brought up the removing managed software dialog and Windows started normally.
I noticed that some files were disappearing on one of the Servers the other day. A few people had noticed. And it finally happened to me. I was roaming through my ‘My Documents’ folder when I noticed that folders that shouldn’t be empty were.
Checking out the KnowledgeBase, I discovered that if your profile folder is the same as your home directory, then the server sometimes decides that the best thing to do is delete the files.
Although it turns out that if you use a subfolder in the home folder this resolves the problem.
I certainly hope so. I don’t think too many people will be impressed with files randomly disappearing…