Drew, We have gone through the exercise of completely standardizing and locking down end-user desktops here at the Georgia Medical Care Foundation. We are not by any means a large enterprise, (150+ seats), however our experiences should "scale up" to that level.
As a result of our efforts, support calls have gone down measurably, spyware and viruses are unable to get a foothold on the machines. Our user community, after a short teathing period, has accepted and embraced the locked down configuration. Yes, we have to manually install some software on machines, but as a result of the standardization this is the exception, not the rule. We have 2 folks dedicated to desktop support, and two others that pitch in when required. Thanks, Anthony Mabes Georgia Medical Care Foundation IT Consultant -----Original Message----- From: Drew Simonis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 9:54 AM To: Focus-MS Subject: Impact of removing administrative rights in an enterprise running XP Hello all, I wonder if anyone on the list who might work for a good sized enterprise (10,000+ seats) has gone through the excercise of removing administrative rights from the user community? Aside from the effort to inventory all applications and ensure that they work with restricted permissions, I forsee that such an effort would likely require changes to the entire support model. Instead of relying on users to install their own software, it would need to be done for them. New hardware would require intevention, etc. If someone has completed this, was support a major new burden, or was it not as difficult as it might be? If it was, how much of a burden was it (+ desktop support headcount? +helpdesk calls?)? -Ds ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
