setting up group policy favorites from server 2003

[cmozment]

First I am not real technical, but I hope someone can help me. What I am interested in doing is developing a way to force a list of websites (hopefully with userid and passwords included) onto the workstations on my domain. The reason for this is that several of the websites that my employees use, have passwords that change periodically. I would also like to be able to set this up so that their machines can get to the websites, but that they do not know the passwords. It would be better from a security stand point if they did not know the passwords, so they could not access these websites from outside our network. (Such as from home, or if they quit etc.)

Does anyone know how to do this. I was thinking (here comes a statement describing my ignorance) that if we had in IE favorites with the cookies for the userid and passwords, and these were sent to the workstations that might work.

Any help MUCH apprciated.

Cecil Ozment

 

[gmail2]

You can push out favourites quiet easily using GPO's. However, you won't be able to push out usernames/passwords or cookies, and even if you could, users could quiet easily clear their cookies and the details would be lost.

I presume you want to do this because the entire company use the same username & password to access the site? Is the site an intranet/extranet site? Or is it a public website? If it's under your company's control then maybe the developers should have a re-think about how they authenticate users?

If this is a public website, then I think you need to look past the desktop PC for your solution. Are you using a proxy server to access the Internet? If you are (and the proxy is within your control) you may be able to setup something on the proxy which would send the credentials automatically when the user accesses the website.

Other than this, if you are running Server 2003 R2, you may be able to look into ADFS (active directory federation services). However, it's not something I've investigated that much, let alone ever implemented. And I THINK the website MAY need to be ADFS aware, but I'm not 100% sure.

Hope there's some info here to get you started

Good Luck

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Irish Poetry and Short Stories - Doghouse Books
Garten und Landschaftsbau