Microsoft® Windows® Desktop Deployment Resource Kit

Elevating Installation Privileges

Privileges are a nasty little paradox. On the one hand, you don’t want to add users to the local Administrators group. Restricting users is a best practice that prevents human error, senseless distractions, opportunistic viruses, and so on. On the other hand, deploying software to restricted users is difficult because they don’t have the privileges necessary to install most applications, such as Office 2003 Editions. What I want to show you in this chapter is how to run processes elevated, so you can perform many of the tasks I’ve described in locked-down environments.

The sections following this one go from elegant to dodgy. Group Policy, specifically the AlwaysInstallElevated policy, is one way to allow restricted ...