Disabling Customer Experience Improvement Program tasks in Windows Server 2008

This tip walks you through the process of disabling the Customer Experience Improvement Program scheduled tasks in Windows Server 2008.

The Windows Server 2008 task scheduler has a large number of new features and interface changes, but some administrators may want to reconfigure the default configuration. For instance, there are three scheduled tasks created with installations of Windows Server 2008 that, if permitted by an administrator, will collect and send usage data to Microsoft as part of the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP).

If you decide to disable the CEIP scheduled tasks, follow these steps. From the Windows Server 2008 Server Manager, launch the Task Scheduler applet and browse to Task Scheduler Library | Microsoft | Windows | Customer Experience Improvement Program. Right-click the Consolidator task and select Disable (Figure A).

Figure A

Browse to the Server section of the Customer Experience Improvement Program task folder, and you’ll see ServerCeipAssistant and ServerRoleCollector. Right-click the scheduled tasks and select Disable (Figure B).

Figure B

The CEIP data collection is a one-way traffic of usage information of Microsoft products from your installations to Microsoft on the Internet. You do not have any visibility to the information being sent, so it would be a better security practice to disable the jobs; otherwise, I don’t see real value in sending this traffic to Microsoft if you don’t know what is being sent or where it goes.