Shoutbox

Hi

At my company we allow people to use MSN/Live messenger, the problem with this is we get quite a few viruses come through messenger, because people just click on links from their friends.

I found out today that you can disable the links in conversation windows, I think this would dramatically cut down the amount of messenger viruses we get, if I could roll it out company wide

I know how to do this on individual machines (in messenger click tools - options - security then untick the allow links in the conversation window option) and i know how to do there is a registry key you can change (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger\PerPassportSettings\) but that needs indiviual passport numbers, which is fine for indiviual machines but not if i want to roll this out to everyone in the company.

Does anyone know of a way around this?

doesnt allowing employees to use WLM send the productivity down just a tad? the easiest, and probably the best solution IMO would be to not let them use it at work. one (assuming they use it while working) their performance isnt as high as it could be, and two, its putting your machines at risk.
even if you would consider it necessary(smeding ;o) email, faxing and phones still exists =p

we cant really block messenger as the CEO wants the company to seem like a nice relaxed place to work at. So we have to allow this. Plus people use it to talk to their clients as well.

So i dont want to disable/uninstall messenger, i just want to disable the links in conversations, i know how to do this individually but not company wide. I dont fancy going round to every machine to do this

I don't think it'd be possible to company-wide change the setting for everyone. I think you'd have to go round and change the setting on each machine. Send out an email telling people to turn the setting off or something.

It may be possible to write a script which created the reg key when the user signed in however. Though then again, it'd have to be installed on each machine(well, each messenger account that signed into the client on that machine would need it installed) aswell.

I don't think there's any easy way around it.

yeah im starting to realise that there isnt a easy way around this! bugger!!!!

I would imagine that you could probably write some kind of script that is forced to run through a computer policy that changes registry key. Don't ask me how, but I'm sure its possible.

Doesnt the Company have technicians that can do this for every machine? usually companys have protocols for these things.

ive been goolging this for a few days (and posting on a few other forums) and im getting the same feed back about maybe doing a script but no one knows how lol

we do have technicans but we cant do it on all our machines manually cos it would be a constant thing when people change machines, a new starter joins... etc etc

Use a JScript on startup to find all accounts (passports) by using a regexp, (or by enumerating the registry keys) and disable the right key...

ok i will look into this, but not sure if that will really help for future use.

Shame microsoft has realesed a corporated edtion for messenger that allows admins to restrict stuff like this...