Home / server / Questions / 76351
Accepted
user155695
Asked: 2009-10-21 04:01:37 +0800 CST

How to automatically set IE settings for all users?

  • 772

I need to alter some settings on Internet Explorer (version 7, but potentially some users may still have version 6).

Doing this manually is fine, change settings, restart IE, done.

However, we have a large amount of users, all of which swap stations on a regular basis, and I'm assuming there is a much more efficient way of doing this than logging into each station as each user.

I'm not a systems admin, but I'd hope there is some command to set IE settings? We could then roll this out automatically.

The settings I need to alter are

  1. Add address to trusted sites
  2. Enable ActiveX controls (under security tab)

Many thanks

security

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can use Microsoft Tweakomatic :

    The Tweakomatic is a nifty new utility that writes scripts that allow you to retrieve and/or configure Windows and Internet Explorer settings. So what, you might ask. Well, think about it. Because these are WMI scripts, they can be used to configure settings on remote computers. Need to change something on a remote machine? Then haul out the Tweakomatic. And think about this: because the Tweakomatic writes scripts, you could do something like run these scripts as logon or logoff scripts. In other words, you could quickly, easily, and automatically configure settings on any or all the computers in your organization.

    • 3

  2. You don't give any details about your environment, but depending how you're setup there are a variety of ways you could do this.

    If you're running a Windows Active Directory, you can use Group Policies to apply these kinds of settings to your users.

    If you have an automated deployment tool in your environment (eg MS SCCM or SMS, GPO, Altiris DS, Novell something, etc) then you can use those to push the registry settings out to your users either via the reg command, or by pushing a .reg file. Or if you're running login scripts you could use the same commands in those.

    This Microsoft Knowledgebase article lists the machine and user registry keys that you can use to change settings for security zones, etc: Internet Explorer security zones registry entries for advanced users, it does list which settings apply to which IE versions, there's no harm in setting an IE7 only setting on an IE6 workstation, it just won't do anything.

    If you want the settings to follow your users around to different machines the obvious way to do this would be to setup roaming profiles stored on a server, or you could just set the job to run at every login via a login script or deployment tool.

    • 3

  3. If you're on a domain, you can use a group policy. Failing that, you might get away with modifying the local computer policy on each workstation.

    • 0