Trouble opening Spark for end users

Hi guys,

I work for a company with some strict GPOs on some of our users. With this in mind, some users are unable to open the Spark client at all. I can login as the admin account and open Spark without any problems, but when the end users click on the Spark.exe, it will not load the program. I couldn’t find anything in the Event Viewer logs regarding the problem, so I’m assuming something in our GPO is silently blocking the program from running.

The program was installed manually at the stations with the EXE downloaded from the website, so it wouldn’t be any remote installation problems.

I’m really just looking for a little more detailed information regarding how Spark operates, in order to know where to look for the problems with our GPOs. I had a look around the site, but couldn’t find the information I was looking for.

Any help would be appreciated.

Remote installation would have made your life a little easier but I doubt it would have helped this. Fortunately Jive provides an MSI to make it a bit easier.

Take a look at the following setting in the GPO for users that are not able to launch the program:

User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Run only allowed Windows applications

If it is enabled you will need to add Spark to the list.

No, we don’t have that option configured in the GPO settings. I’ve also checked under the computer configuration settings for any similar policies, but I couldn’t find any that would limit the programs run for the specific users that are having problems. The same computer policies are run on the systems for both the working users and the non-working users. So it almost certainly has to be something in the User configuration policies.

Thanks for the reply.

A simple test would be to assign the policy of a working user to a non-working user (do a gpupdate /force from a cmd line to ensure the new policy takes affect). If that user begins to work the you need to examine the policy closer. Is the Spark folder being created under the user’s profile of a non-working user? It would be in the root of the profile. Lastly due to your method of install it could be a permission issue. Check to see if users have read/execute permissions.

Yeah, I’ve made test users under each OU and it’s definately the User Configuration settings that are limiting Spark from running. I checked the permissions on the Spark folders too, all of the necessary groups have the right permissions.

So it’s just a matter of tracking down the stray policy setting, which is no easy feat with over 1500 settings to choose from. I’ll update this post when I find the cuplrit.

Thanks anyways guys.