For the last while I've been on the Service Pack 1 beta for Windows Vista and
in my opinion SP1 has fixed most of the issues the original RTM release had,
especially performance issues. So I'm confident that enterprises will begin
accelerating their deployment plans for Vista now that SP1 is about to be released.
One thing is still missing from Vista however, and that's the capability you
had in XP to right-click on a program or shortcut on your desktop or in Windows
Explorer, select RunAs, and run the program with any credentials you want to
specify. Instead, Vista replaced this feature with Run As Administrator, which
lets you run a program as an administrator (if you know the credentials for
an admin account) while logged on to your computer as a standard user.
But what if you want to run a program using different (non-administrator) credentials?
This has been a major complaint among some enterprises as some management applications
need to be run using a special account, or may even require running under domain
admin creds-and logging onto a Vista workstation (or any workstation for that
matter) using domain admin creds is not a very good idea (get the Windows Server
2008 Security Resource Kit from Microsoft Press when it's released to find out
why).
A workaround you can use is to use runas.exe from the command-line, which still
works the same way it did in XP. But if you work more with the Explorer shell
than from the command-line, this loss of right-click'n'runas functionality is
frustrating. Another workaround is to create a shortcut to runas.exe that specifies
the program you want to run and the credentials you want it to run under. For
example, you could create a shortcut to
C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /user:CONTOSO\Administrator "C:\Program
Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"
and when you double-click on the shortcut you can type the password for the
Administrator account in the CONTOSO domain and Internet Explorer will launch
using these credentials. This is tedious though if you have a lot of different
programs you need to run this way.
Is there no hope for bringing back RunAs to Vista? You bet they do! Just a
couple of days ago, Mark Russinovich, the creator of the Windows SysInternals
suite of power tools, released a new tool called ShellRunas which lets you add
back the right-click'n'runas functionality you had in XP. Just download the
package from here, unzip it, run shellrunas /reg from the directory you unzipped
it to, and Presto! You can right-click on a program in Explorer and get Run
As Different User as an option.
So does Microsoft listen to their customers? Well, Mark does, anyway -- thanks
Mark!
