Saturday, February 18, 2012

The User Experience Team at Microsoft has lost it


Someone fire the entire UX team, please. Removing the iconic colors, seriously??? The folks in Windows UX and at Pentragram don't really get the true spirit of Windows.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Solution to your Windows permission troubles

As you may or may not have noticed, beginning with Windows Vista, it is not possible to set NTFS security ACLs, ownership and audit permissions on more than one selected item using Windows Explorer because the Security tab has been removed from the Properties for multiple selected items. Microsoft states that this feature was removed as the UAC prompt which may need to be displayed to gain ownership and reset permissions cannot accommodate the names of multiple selected files. This is just an excuse, they could have easily designed a property sheet that elevates properly to set permissions. I ranted about it few years back because Microsoft does nothing to fix the issue. After more than five years of the release of Windows Vista, this issue is not yet fixed. A third party solution called SetACL Studio comes to the rescue. SetACL Studio is a graphical tool that also lets you do a lot more with NTFS permissions than just setting them on multiple files - you can do remote permissions, registry permissions, services, printer and network share permissions and undo all actions. Highly recommended. They also have a command line FREE open source tool called SetACL which has been around for almost 10 years now, but command line doesn't quite make it easy when we are dealing with batch permissionns.

Visit the SetACL Studio website for more details on the GUI tool, SetACL Studio. SetACL Studio is a commercial product, but totally worth it if you are a Windows administrator or IT person having to deal with permissions frequently.