Should you empower the user to make the necessary changes? You might as well open Pandora's Box. Locking down company desktops prevents misguided and disgruntled users from doing all sorts of damage. Many users envision the Web as a pristine frontier ripe for downloads.

Should you get an IT tech support person? Modifying one machine at a time isn't an efficient use of professional staff.

So what should you do? One cost-effective solution is to empower the user with security. Develop simple in-house problem-solving tools that run by the user and for the user but not as the user.

There are many good desktop control packages to suse for the following examples. Whatever your choice, be sure it supports a flexible RunAs feature and utilizes simple control statements. The sample code snippets shown in the examples below demonstrate the WinBatch development tool. Each sample solves a different practical problem. This package is freely downloadable (sans compiler). Because executable code runs in privileged mode, when the user clicks, the change sticks.

Practical examples