Vista - Controlling the Sidebar

The sidebar in Vista is Billed as being an efficient way to access lightweight apps (Gadgets) that perform a specific task well, in much the same way that Yahoo Widgets (formally Konfabulator), and Google gadgets work.  The problem with having these competing interfaces is interoperability between them, and the Vista Sidebar being supported solely on Vista.  Whilst the sidebar has been successfully ported to XP here, it remains to be seen whether Microsoft will offer it as a supported product in XP.

So in mixed OS environments, do you make use of this feature of Vista?  Well if the answer is yes, you can control how it behaves through GPO, and as the defaults leave it pretty user configurable this maybe a good idea.

The GPOs can be configured on a machine or user basis and the policy settings can be found in gpedit under either User or Machine Configuration branch – Administrative templates – Windows Components – Windows Sidebar.  There are only some fairly basic settings here, but essential for locking down the use of the sidebar:-

Turn off Windows Sidebar
Obviously does what it says on the tin, however if you don’t configure this the sidebar will be displayed by default.
Turn off unsigned Windows Sidebar gadgets     
This will stop the sidebar running any gadgets that haven’t been digitally signed.  Again this is switched off by default and will allow the running of any gadget regardless of whether or not it is signed.
Turn off user installed Windows Sidebar Gadgets.
This prevents the sidebar from running any gadgets that have been installed by the user.  Again if you don’t configure this it gives users free reign on what gadgets they install.
Override the more gadgets link
This enables you to redirect the ‘Get more gadgets online’ link to a website of your choice.  If you don’t configure this, the link goes to the default Microsoft site.


So if you want to lockdown how the sidebar is used by your users, it’s important you configure the GPOs accordingly.