By Development Team
What's new in Admin By Request 7
What is Admin By Request 7 about?
Admin By Request 7 is about re-thinking the user experience based on the feedback we have gotten from our customers. As a systems administrator, the end user is your customer. The end user has to be happy and not feel taking a away admin rights is a pain. Therefore, we have focused on making the user experience even better and faster than before. To some users, the user experience is even better than when they had admin rights. Read on to learn what our thinking is, what we changed and why.
Performance
The first thing you will notice is a significant performance improvement. Because of this, the splash screen you were used to seeing with the previous versions no longer appears. It will appear in the lower right corner as a system notification only, if the operation takes longer than 3 seconds. You will most likely never see it.
User Account Control
One of the most common feedback is that it is annoying to users that frequently invoke Admin By Request (such as developers) that they have to enter credentials every time. This was originally a design choice, because with the yes/no option, you cannot be sure that the person you see in your Auditlog actually is the user it says, because the end user can always argue that someone else did it on an unlocked screen. This potentially represents a legal problem in case the Auditlog has to be used in a legal matter. However, in the real world, it is annoying to frequent users. You can now define in your setting, whether you want UAC to use a confirm or credentials pop-up, controllable through sub-settings. This means you can have the default global settings as credentials and sub-settings for trusted staff (such as IT) as confirmation.
That said - we had about 100 customers testing the beta version and we learned that most that participated intend to use the "Confirm" option for all staff. Therefore, the "Confirm" option was decided to be the default. This is also consistent with the Windows default, when you have full local admin rights.
Theming
We have also modernized the user experience to use latest Windows 10 design guides. Previous versions also had a skin option (default or black), but it now follows the user’s preference, unless you decide otherwise in your settings. The default is auto-detect based on user’s default Windows mode and therefore the default is now Black, as this is Windows default:
Here you can see the difference in a UAC confirmation box.
Branding
Branding is important to all our customers. The main reason is usually not so much that the logo and name go on user interfaces, but it adds trust to the end user. Here a logo was used in the web settings.
The two other User Account Control screens are the PIN code and reason screens. The reason screen is a two-in-one to save user’s time as the confirmation box does not appear first.
Admin By Request logo recognition
Another customer feedback is that it would be helpful to users and support personnel helping end users if it was more recognizable when Admin By Request is in effect and when it's not. For this reason, the desktop icon for Administrator Sessions is no longer the UAC standard icon, but the Admin By Request logo:
When you work with Admin By Request, the logo is clearly recognizable as you work with it:
