Deploying Click-to-Play for Flash on IE with GPO

Introduction After reading an article on how to set Flash as Click-to-Play in every browser from How-to Geek, I decided to see how y...

Introduction

After reading an article on how to set Flash as Click-to-Play in every browser from How-to Geek, I decided to see how you could set Flash to Click-to-Play on Internet Explorer without having to go around to each computer and toggle the setting. 

This is the result of that work. I tested on Windows 7 Pro 64 bit SP1.

Steps (4 total)

1

Make a new GPO

Open up Group Policy Management, and go to Group Policy Objects.
Right-click Group Policy Objects, and select “New”.
Name it “Flash click-to-play for IE”.
Right-click on the new GPO, and choose Edit.

2

Set up your new GPO

Under User Configuration, click on Preferences, then Windows Settings, and finally Registry.
Right-click Registry
Choose New, Registry Item
Set Action to Create
Key Path is:
Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Stats\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000}\iexplore\AllowedDomains
Leave Value name blank
Hit OK, and close the Group Policy Management Editor window.

3

Set the scope & link it

You’ll want to define the scope- you'll set it to the Users you want covered by this- not the machines.
Once you have the users defined, make sure to link it to a domain by right-clicking on the domain you want, choosing “Link an Existing GPO”, and then picking “Flash click-to-play for IE” (or whatever you named it).

4

Notes & Things to be Aware of

This is a Per-User GPO, not a Per-Machine GPO (because the key you're changing is only found in HKCU).

How to add a domain to the whitelist:
To add domains to the whitelist, add a new Key under AllowedDomains with just the domain name- adobe.com for example.

Conclusion

Hopefully this makes it easier to manage Flash on your network until such time as you can remove it entirely.

References

• How to Enable Click-to-Play Plugins in Every Web Browser