PolicyPak: Manage IE Content tab

Hi. This is Jeremy Moskowitz, former Group Policy MVP. In this series of videos, we’re learning how to manage Internet Explorer – all versions – using PolicyPak.

In this video, we’re talking about the “Content” tab. You can see here, there’s this thing called the “Content Advisor,” which would have to be manually set up on each machine. This is Internet Explorer 8, which shows “Content Advisor.” More modern versions of Internet Explorer like 11 don’t show it, but it honors the settings anyway.

I’m going to show you how to set it up very quickly using PolicyPak. Here is our entry in a Group Policy Object. Just click on the “Content” tab. You need to click to “Turn on Content Advisor for IE.” You can also dictate a “Password” whatever you want. We’ve got our favorite password set in there (“p@ssw0rd”).

Then you’ve got the various sites that will be allowed or blocked. By way of example, you can allow Google with “https” but block it with “http.” You can also allow other websites, and you can also remove a certain website from the “Content Advisor.” Therefore, if somebody has put it in, it will be removed. You can “allow” it, “block” it, or “remove” it – those are the three keywords there. It’s as simple as that.

You can also set up things like right here under “Settings” all these particular “Content Advisor Ratings,” things that will depict “alcohol” and “tobacco” and so on, all these naughty things. You can make it “Limited” or “None” for depiction of these things and so on and click “OK.” These are all honored in all versions of Internet Explorer.

We’ll go ahead and click “OK” here. Now we’ll go over to our target machine and we will run “gpupdate.” Now if you’ll remember, it was disabled. When it’s done, I’ll show you that it’s now enabled. Let’s go ahead and go over there.

Go back to “Tools/Internet Options.” Go over to “Content,” and you can see it’s now enabled. You know it’s enabled because it’s now the ability to “Disable” it. If you click “Settings,” you need the admin rights first, but then you need the “Password” second. PolicyPak has dictated the password, and then you can modify these things here if you are so inclined.

Actually, all these things are available, like I said, inside PolicyPak. I think I picked that one and that one, something like that. I don’t know which one it was. Long story short: PolicyPak will dictate these settings as you want to. That’s the key takeaway there for managing “Content.”

In Internet Explorer 11 – I don’t have Internet access or else I would show it to you – but it does pick up the settings and will honor them exactly the same way. There’s just no need to turn it on expressly.

If you have any questions about this, be sure to post your questions to the forum or email support and we’ll get you going from there.

Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.