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Fight Messenger with GPO

Temp workers. You know those people who come to the office for a bit and have a lot of free time. Of course eventually some of them manage to get into the job and succeed but most of them are just slackers.

Most of the time they would just sit at their job not asking you if there is something to do; looking busy but chatting on Msn messenger or others. Help fight the laziness and re-establish a good workload for everyone! Block messenging software using GPO.

Using the Group Policy Editor, edit the policy for which you want to prohibit instant messaging. Navigate to User Configuration->Administrative Templates->System and double click on "Don't run specified Windows applications" in the right window pane.

Make sure the option is "Enabled" and click the Show button.

Click on add and type in the name of the instant messaging program's executable that you want to block. Such names include:
Google Talk — googletalk.exe
MSN Messenger — msnmsgr.exe
Windows Messenger — msmsgs.exe
AOL Instant Messenger — aim.exe
Trillian — trillian.exe

Once you've finished entering in all of the programs you want to block, click Ok. Then apply. Then Ok.

When the user tries to work with the programs you've blocked using either the shortcut or via the Start Run program, they will see a notification that looks like this:

Now, there's one problem to this. If a user is smart, they can still start the program by typing the name of the program into Run in the Start Menu. However, administrators have a response to this.

Make it harder for users to get to the run command by using GPO to remove run from the Start Menu. Open up the Group Policy Object:

User Configuration ->Administrative Templates ->Start Menu & Taskbar and Enable Remove Run from the Start Menu. Done.

Meanwhile you can learn more about software restriction from the MSFT website.