Admin right to IIS7 for user using group policy or script

Update: The original question was for Windows Server 2008, but the solution is easier for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 (and Windows 7 and 8). You can add the user through the NTFS UI by typing it in directly. The name is in the format of IIS APPPOOL\{app pool name}. For example: IIS APPPOOL\DefaultAppPool.

IIS APPPOOL\{app pool name}

Note: Per comments below, there are two things to be aware of:

• Enter the string directly into the "Select User or Group" and not in the search field.
• In a domain environment you need to set the Location to your local computer first.

Reference to Microsoft Docs article: Application Pool Identities > Securing Resources

Original response: (for Windows Server 2008) This is a great feature, but as you mentioned it's not fully implemented yet. You can add the app pool identity from the command prompt with something like icacls, then you can manage it from the GUI. For example, run something like this from the command prompt:

icacls c:\inetpub\wwwroot /grant "IIS APPPOOL\DefaultAppPool":(OI)(CI)(RX)

Then, in Windows Explorer, go to the wwwroot folder and edit the security permissions. You will see what looks like a group (the group icon) called DefaultAppPool. You can now edit the permissions.

However, you don't need to use this at all. It's a bonus that you can use if you want. You can use the old way of creating a custom user per app pool and assigning the custom user to disk. That has full UI support.

This SID injection method is nice because it allows you to use a single user but fully isolate each site from each other without having to create unique users for each app pool. Pretty impressive, and it will be even better with UI support.

Note: If you are unable to find the application pool user, check to see if the Windows service called Application Host Helper Service is running. It's the service that maps application pool users to Windows accounts.

With UAC enabled you cannot map drives in a logon script that is assigned using a Group Policy Object (GPO). The GPO logon script does run, but under a different security context, so the mappings get lost.

Microsoft provides a sample script, called launchapp.wsf that works around this problem by running your real logon script a moment later under the correct security context.

It is available here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766208(WS.10).aspx

Look for the section titled “Group Policy Scripts can fail due to User Account Control” and also Appendix A, which is the source code for launchapp.wsf.

launchapp.wsf does fix the problem of mapping drives on Vista (and Windows 7) PCs that have UAC enabled. However, it causes another problem: it doesn't work in Windows XP, so XP computers show an error instead of running the logon script.

Fortunately XP computers don't need the launchapp hack, so my company made a modified version of launchapp that tries to do things the Vista way, but if that fails (because you're running XP), it just launches the real logon script straightaway. I can’t share this with you as it’s internal to my company (has real server names etc.) but it wasn’t too hard to do.