Administrator rights on computer and ProE

[loke_toke]

I'm the administrator of ProE and PDMLink at my department.At the moment everybody working with CAD in the departmant has administrator righton their own workstation including myself, this is of course very handy. Now our IT-department want to take our workstation administrator rights away due to some policy. Can anybody see any potential problems with this?


Of course I want to keep the rights so what arguments can I usewhen I speak to the IT-dept.? Will the operation of ProE/PDMLink on mine and my colleuges workstations suffer from losing the administrator rights?

 

[dgs]

I would say as the admin, you ought to have admin rights, so you can, you know, admin. I don't think the users need it, though.

The caveat to that would be if you are copying config files for a central location into the Pro/E install directory and that install is in the default location in 'Program Files'. Without admin rights, you won't be able to do the copy, however, that can be fixed simply by giving the user's full permissions on the install folders.

 

[loke_toke]

Thank you for the replay.


Very good point Doug, thiswillalso be one of my aguments when I speak to the IT guys.


Regards


Peter Sundvall

 

[looslib]

It does depend on what OS, too. WinXP requires less use of admin rights than Win7.

 

[loke_toke]

We use both XP an Win7 at the moment. But XP will be phased out before the end of the year.


Could you explain what the difference between XP and Win7 is in regards to ProE and admin rights.

 

[srieger]

You should be able to set the local users up as a power user. This should give them all the rights they need to operate Pro/Engineer.


Where the problem come in is where applications are being installed and registry entries need to be made. Some registry entries require Admin rights.


A power user will be able to install printers and such as well as manage local files/folders.


Worst case, you can set up a custom group and explicitly set the permissions.


I used to always do this but it got to be a pain when certain other applications had to be installed as the user AND it required Administrative rights. I decided that local admin rights didn't affect the network so much as a whole so I opted to change it to have users with local admin rights.


A big problem with having local admin rights would really be the user screwing up their own computer or even bigger, a virus or malware can get easier access from a web page to access the computer.


I have several things in place to reduce this but removing admin rights for local users would also be another item to be able to add.


The fact of the matter is that some applications require local admin rights for certain things as well and from a management point of view, it's very cumbersome to deal with these and customize for every situation.


I guess this has arguments for both ways but hopefully it enlightened a little.

 

[loke_toke]

Thanks Scott.


I agree with you that having local admin right put more responsability on the individual user to be careful what they install on their comuter. So in that sense I understand the our IT-dept.


On the other hand when administation software like ProE, Ansys, MathCAD and such I think it's a must to have admin rights to make it work with the least effort. And as an Engineer I think it's important to keep the administration of "Engineering software" close to the R&D department since these are our primary tools.


Regards
Edited by: loke_toke