Historically, the ChefDK requires Admin rights in order to launch on Windows (using the supplied shortcut). I was hoping that this changed in Chef Workstation but to my dismay, the default shortcut still launches requiring Administrative rights on Windows.
Why is this the case? Clearly Chef must understand that in the enterprise, nobody has Admin rights (and nor should they) on their local workstations. To require this is to perpetuate an anti-pattern in my opinion and is a pain point for people like me who have to get Chef Workstation running in an enterprise environment.
I was told in a prior response that none of the tooling within the ChefDK actually requires admin privileges, but that there is some reason due to the way they are creating the shortcut (or something like that). The following workaround was given to launch the DK without admin privs, but in the new version of the Chef Workstation, doing this you loose having access to the ConEmu function, which I found to be a nice feature.
chef shell-init powershell | iex
import-module chef -disablenamechecking
Thanks.