Yesterday the IEBlog announced the availability of the IE8 Blocker Toolkit. For those who aren’t quite ready to get Internet Explorer 8 on their home machine(s) or on all the machines they manage at work, this is a blessing.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not quite ready for this one – haven’t had the time, chance or inclination to really do some testing with it yet. And I should be clear that I have no clue when IE8 will be pushed out – the blog doesn’t offer any dates. So this is all just prep work.
Fortunately, the toolkit is very easy to work with. If you’re managing just your own machine (say, at home) or a small handful of machines you can run the little blocker script on each and be covered. If you’re managing a herd of machines via Active Directory you can use the included administrative template and hit all the machines with one quick change.
I opted for the latter option at the office this morning. And, as always, I first spent five minutes bumbling around trying to recall how to edit the Group Policy for Domains… it’s not that tough, I just always forget where it is! So what follows is a quick reminder.
Start by launching “Active Directory Users and Computers.” In the initial tree, locate the domain you want to manage, right-click on it and hit properties. In the resulting dialog jump to the “Group Policy” tab:
This domain is setup pretty straight-forward so I just select the Default Domain Policy and click Edit.
Now just follow the directions on importing the Administrative Template – and don’t forget to change the value to “Enabled” afterwards!
Oh, see the note in that dialog about upgrading to the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC)? I did that on one of my machines. Hate it! But that’s just me and not really germane to this post 
There. Now, next time I do a web search on the topic I’ll likely find it on my own blog.
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January 8th, 2009 
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Hi,
GPMC is ok… -:).. but never mind. Great info. I’m not ready to push IE8 on my company LAN yet. FYI I did not even pushed IE7 yet, because we had a compatibility issue with one of ours applications.
Cheers
Vladan
I guess I’ll have to look closer at GPMC, but my first look left me dazed and confused! I couldn’t find anything.
With all the problems that the had with IE7 i’m scared to even think
about switching over to IE8. Between crashes and everthing else,
there’s no way I’m downloading it until others have tested. When
ever they decide to release it.