There are many times that administrators want to control what end users can and can not do. One of those common situations is which widgets end users are allowed to copy to the My Widgets Sidebar Panel.
Assigning a desktop policy and adjusting the specific fields in this policy will help to accurately control what and end user can and can not do with widgets in their Notes client.
The section of the desktop policy that you will want to focus in on is the widgets tab under the desktop settings document.
The file that is updated on the client by the policy is the:
Notes\Data\Workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings\com.ibm.rcp.toolbox.admin.prefs
We will focus on a few of these fields:
Send widgets using e-mail: Enable or Disable this setting controls weather an end user can send a widget to others inside or outside their organization. Users can right click on the widget and select to send the widget if enabled. An email message will be created with an extension.xml attachment in the message
value affected by policy- toolboxsendAsEmail=
Install widgets from e-mail or other: Enabling this field allows users to install widgets received from email messges or from widgets on the web. To prevent users from being able to import or drag and drop widgets in the My Widgets Sidebar Panel, make sure this is disabled. This will allow the administrator complete control over end users copying unnescessrary or unwanted widgets into the client. Only widgets from the widget catalog on the server will be allowed in the My Widgets section.
value affected by policy- toolboxinstallFromOther=
Install widgets from catalog: Enable or Disable this field. Disabling prevents the user from being able to open the widget catalog on the server and installing any widget they choose from the widget catalog to the My Widgets Sidebar Panel. This allows the admin more control over which widgets the users have access to on their client. By disabling this it does not prevent the widgets that the admin has assigned to be placed in the My Widgets Sidebar Panel. It only prevents the user from opening the widgets catalog on the server and manually copying
value affected by policy- toolboxinstallFromCatalog=
Setting all three of these settings to Disabled will give the administrator the maximum amount of control over the end user and what widgets will reside on the Notes client.
If during the process of attempting to implement these settings changes you do not see the settings go into affect confirm that the policy is assigned to the user
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/2.3_Policies
and remember the policy precedence
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/domino-policy-precedence-explained