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I'm a developer of internal software in our company, I've gotten used to UAC in Win7, I prefer to run with in enabled so that our software works correctly with it enabled.

Sysadmins have recently pushed out GPO that turns it off every time we log-in. (So I turn it back on every time I log in.) I can imagine some people are annoyed by it and turn it off, but is that really a good company-wide decision? anyone annoyed by it (local admins) would already have permission to turn it of themselves.. right?

On the other hand we don't have to worry creating UAC friendly software if no workstations or servers have it enabled.

Is there a good reason for doing this? Other than reducing help-desk calls from users recently upgraded from XP?

I can't see the upside of this decision, help me understand.

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    There's really only one place to get a definitive answer to this: from them.
    – Rob Moir
    Dec 23, 2010 at 17:52
  • I'll look into that, but Dev's and sysadmins here don't really talk to each other. When we do it's usually a pissing contest. If there are any good reasons they might do this, I'd like to be aware of them before going into battle.
    – DanO
    Dec 23, 2010 at 17:58
  • It's a matter of usability versus security. I'm sure they have a valid reason or mandate to turn it off, but as Robert stated, the answer can only come from them.
    – joeqwerty
    Dec 23, 2010 at 18:19
  • they could create a separate ou and put the developers in it should there be a business need for it. It isn't that hard to do.
    – aduljr
    Dec 24, 2010 at 17:41

3 Answers 3

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I can see enforcing it be turned off if you have an existing enterprise app that just plain doesn't work well with it enabled.

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I can't see a really good reason to disable it. In fact when I'm controlling the GPOs I actually enable it on all machines.

Disabling it wouldn't reduce XP help desk calls, as XP would ignore the UAC GPO settings.

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  • It would reduce the calls from people who have recently been upgraded FROM XP to Vista or 7 though, who wouldn't have seen UAC before.
    – northirid
    Dec 23, 2010 at 19:16
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UAC is very useful in situations when your users don't have admin rights on computer so an admin can come up and easily fix something as he will be prompted for password by UAC. Withouht this it's a bit more time consuming.

I don't use UAC on my own computer and my servers as some software tends to freak out during installation with UAC turned on (like recent SP/Patches to Microsoft products).

Other then that all my users have UAC enabled and I wouldn't turn it off unless everyone does have admin rights on computer.

Also if you're developer keep on developing UAC aware applications... you never know when decision to turn it back on will be done :-)

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