six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2014-06-04

Domain Password Change in Remote Desktop Sessions

At work we're connecting to customer systems through a jump station. This creates the problem that for domain password changes on the customer systems I can't open the Windows Security dialog/screen via either Ctrl+Alt+Del (shows the one on the local computer) or Ctrl+Alt+End (shows the one on the jump station).

On Windows Versions prior to Server 2012 the dialog/screen could be accessed through the start menu by clicking Start → Windows Security… (or Start → Settings → Windows Security…). However, the new (and somewhat less than improved) start screen in Windows Server 2012 no longer provides this option.

Since bringing back the start menu with something like Classic Shell usually isn't an option on customer systems, I needed another way for changing my domain passwords. Fortunately the Shell object provides a method WindowsSecurity(), so I can bring up that screen with a single line of VBScript:

CreateObject("Shell.Application").WindowsSecurity

or PowerShell:

(New-Object -ComObject 'Shell.Application').WindowsSecurity()

Posted 23:14 [permalink]