Drew, We did this with our last roll out of PC's and the major impact to our help desk were calls complaining that the latest version of some whiz-bang application could not be installed.
We had already anticipated a change in our support model and during the planning stages, we set up Group Policy to allow certain applications to be installed and through Windows Firewall. Hardware support is not provided for items not approved by our department. Our headcount went up during the roll out by two and stayed that way for a couple of months until we had any unforeseeable kinks worked out. Our normal working team is three plus our manager for 400-425 PC's and 300-375 users plus our servers. For users that need administrative rights, we have have an approval process they go through and once they are approved, they abide by the policy we have created that spells out what they can and cannot do. If the user violates the policy, we will strip the rights and send a report to HR. If it was a minor infraction, we will give a one-time pass. All in all, our user community has embraced the policy and actually have commented on how they like it. Before, we were fighting infections (Spyware primarily) almost daily. Now, with our tighten GP and locked down PC's, we are seeing issues maybe once a week or two. Sure there are times when we have load a an application for a user but it is not big of a deal and with a base as large as yours, you can do it remotely. -M -----Original Message----- From: Drew Simonis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 6:54 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
