It’s Friday and it’s sunny in my neighborhood, which means it is blog posting time! Let’s talk about WMI filters today, shall we? If I have WMI Filters and Group Policy Preferences targeting, do they cancel out? Does one have precedence? Will the world explode? My answers are: No, Yes, and Maybe someday...

If you couldn't make it to the TechEd Australia 2009 conference in the Gold Coast, you missed a lot of great presentations! Luckily, they were recorded and published here: What’s new in Win7/Server 2008 R2 (Gutnik) SRV310 http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=d9c80bdd-2413-4ca3-8d61-cfccb9200f77...

Alan and I had a great time presenting about Group Policy Preferences at TechEd Australia a few weeks ago. He did a quick demo in our session about configuring Power Schemes; here's the breakdown in more detail. He captures the idea of targeting power plans to be sensitive to the time of day, so you...

I just read a couple of great articles written in the past couple months about Group Policy. Ever wondered which policy is going to 'win' on a client with overlapping settings from different GPOs? Want to know more about Starter GPO's or Preferences? Read on... The first one walks through how to...

Hi, I’m Florian, one of the Group Policy MVPs . You may know us MVPs from conferences, seminars, books, Newsgroups and Forums where we voluntarily provide help and guidance to Group Policy and its associated products. Today, I’d like to write about a feature in Group Policy Preferences you could find...

You might know GP Preferences is great for mapping drives , pushing out shortcuts, and adding new folders. But did you know that you can use GP Preferences to add a printer and set it as default? Check it out: Here’s the Devices and Printers inventory on my Windows 7 Client machine: one shared Canon...

PolicyMaker customers have been waiting for an easy way to migrate their PolicyMaker settings over to Group Policy Preference settings. The solution is finally here!! We have developed a commandline tool that you can run against your environment to find all of your PolicyMaker settings and convert them...

There was a great question in the blog comments, I’m going to post the answer up here because I think the answer is cool. Can a location (UNC) be set using both an environmental variable and a static entry? I'll explain by example.  Let's say that there are shares named %username%Folder (FredFolder...

I just got back from another great MMS in Las Vegas and I’d like to thank everyone who stopped by the booth, attended the Group Policy-related sessions, and asked great questions about Group Policy and AGPM (thanks to Chris for Tweeting about it!). I’m so glad to see that more and more people are using...

Have you ever wanted to configure a preference item to include a specific user name and password? You can do so in several types of preference items, but you should first consider the security ramifications of embedding a user name and password in a preference item. Are passwords in preference items...

I mentioned this in the last post, here are some more examples. To download the script, check the 'Attachments' link by clicking on this post's title and then scrolling to the bottom. Quick refresher: This script’s usage is as follows: SearchGPOsForSetting.ps1 [–IsComputerConfiguration] <Boolean>...

Group Policy Preferences quick tip: To ensure that preferences are applied to clients, make sure that clients have the CSEs and XMLLite installed If you’re like us, you’re seriously excited about Group Policy Preferences. You’re excited because you can’t wait to save yourself scripting time, and to...

We received an email from Daniel today. He’s done a great blog post on how to use Group Policy Preferences to deploy printer settings to workstations. I'm sure Lilia is with me on this though: we can think of plenty more reasons than just one to use GP Preferences :) The pain of manual configuration...

Too often, I ask if people are familiar with GP Preferences and get a blank stare. I will say this over and over again: GP Preferences will dramatically reduce your logon scripts GP Preferences has clean, easy-to-use reporting and UI Lots of things get accomplished in scripts (mapped drives...

Everyone has their own troubleshooting quick checks; here are some that you may know well, and others you haven’t tried yet. Logon/Logoff Some policies applied only after the second logon, not after the first logon. What’s the deal? Anything that is set to run synchronously won’t run until...

How to: use F5-F6-F7-F8 to control what settings you want pushed out, lock down the Advanced tab with a preference setting to act like policy Last time I talked about how to use F5-F8 keys to use the glanularity that we love so much about Preferences. Now, time for an example of using GP Preferences...

I set a Preference setting, but it didn’t work. The answer? Probably F5-F6-F7-F8. GP Preferences has a ton of compelling reasons to use it; the functionality allows admins to configure settings that are difficult to impossible to achieve through policy (deploying shortcuts, setting up drive maps...

To keep you in the loop, many of you have asked whether we intend to provide support for PolicyMaker Preferences and migrate to Windows Server 2008's Group Policy Preferences. I can confirm we are currently testing a tool that will be able to perform this migration. We are pleased with the quality...

Have you ever wanted to configure a preference item to include a specific user name and password? You can do so in several types of preference items, but you should first consider the security ramifications of embedding a user name and password in a preference item. Are passwords in preference items...

The Group Policy preference extension is designed to allow developers to extend the Application preference item. For those applications that are currently unsupported by Group Policy preferences, you can create your own property sheet extension for the Application preference item. And we have added...

Now available, Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) is the collection of Windows Server management tools provided to enable IT professionals to manage their Windows Server infrastructure from their computers running Windows Vista with Service Pack 1. RSAT is available as a separate download rather...

These are some serious toys delivering a large punch of power from the suite formerly known as PolicyMaker. You don't need to have Windows Server 2008 or Vista SP1 to use the tools -- now called Group Policy preferences. They include more than 20 new Group Policy client-side extensions, expanding the...