Update: Don't misunderstand UAC, other Vista features, MIcrosoft says

May 16, 2008 (IDG News Service) In its continued attempt to convince business customers to adopt Vista, Microsoft Corp. has outlined and tried to explain some of what it calls the operating system's most "misunderstood" features in a document posted to -- then mysteriously removed from -- its Web site this week.

In the document, "Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista," Microsoft lists what it believes are five features of Vista that "cause confusion" and "slow Windows Vista adoption" for most users. The company identified User Account Control, Image Management, Display Driver Model, Windows Search and 64-bit architecture as features that are flummoxing IT professionals when they install Vista across desktops on a network. It offered tips for how to deal with common problems.

The document was posted to the Web site Friday morning. However, by the afternoon, the link was no longer working. It still came up in a Live Search of the Microsoft Web site, but the link provided there also was inactive.

On Monday, Microsoft said through its public relations firm that the company identified "inaccuracies" in the document once it was posted. Microsoft did not elaborate on what those inaccuracies were. The white paper has been taken down for further editing and will be reposted once that is complete, the company said.

Businesses have been slow to adopt Vista since its enterprise introduction in late November 2006, and by now, users have identified the features listed in the document as some of their biggest pain points.

One that has been especially problematic -- and even spoofed in an Apple Inc. TV commercial -- is User Account Control (UAC). UAC prevents users without administrative privileges from making unauthorized changes to a PC. But because of its settings, it can prevent even authorized users on the network from being able to access applications and features they should normally have access to. It does this through a series of screen prompts that ask the user to verify privileges, and it may require a user to type in a password to perform a task.

In its document, Microsoft said the feature has gotten a "bad rap" because it's a "set of technologies" dispersed throughout the operating system and designed to protect the system in a variety of ways, not just one feature that can be controlled in an isolated way.

Microsoft also designed UAC to "help nudge [independent software vendors] towards designing applications that function in Standard User mode," one of two user privilege modes in UAC. The other is Local Administrator.

As it stands now, the prompts interrupt normal workflow, even in some mundane tasks, unless a user is set as Local Administrator. This is because the many third-party Windows applications that predate Vista weren't developed to work with UAC's "Standard User" designation, so they default to requiring Local Administrator rights, said Keith Brown, a network administrator at Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville, Ga. Gwinnett is a not-for-profit medical network serving more than 700 physicians around the Atlanta area.

Reprinted with permission from

IDG.net
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