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...

Happy Holidays! http://www.youtube.com/user/jeremymoskowitz#p/u/0/UsYkbLzVsM8 This is the Group Policy present you've been asking for : a step by step video of how to install the GPMC using a GUI or a commandline from Jeremy Moskowitz, one of our...

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...

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...

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...

PowerShell! The name alone should get you excited. Wait until you see all the cool stuff you can do with PowerShell in the Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 release of the Group Policy management tools. For those of you who have yet to learn PowerShell...

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...

Wow! What a confusing title. So, why did I use this? Your feedback tells us there is some confusion over our terminology for our new extension, Group Policy preferences. And I aim to clear up this confusion in this post. In the beginning of Group...

Lots of people ask the Group Policy Team: What are the best settings to configure? What is the most secure GPO we can deploy? I've been talking about this a lot with the Group Policy customer support folks, and the topic resulted in the following editorial...

Green is the color of the decade, at least for the moment. What can you do from a Group Policy perspective? More than you might think. What do you do to manage power settings with Group Policy? Answer in the comments. Before Al Gore warned about the plight...

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...

I’d like to give a big shout out to Sean Gallinetti for providing the custom ADM example files. One use of creating and setting the default value of a registry key is creating the list of blocked and allowed cookies to configure the per site privacy...

If you've upgraded your Vista client to SP1, you've found that installing Windows Vista SP1 removes GPMC; installing RSAT will put GPMC back on your client. You can install RSAT from the following locations: Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools...

How could something like CRUD be desirable? In Group Policy world, even the impossible becomes possible. In this entry, you’ll discover why Red does not mean Error and what the different colors mean when you make a Preference item. Read on! Let’s talk...

It’s interesting what you can discover when you right-click on something. For example, in the Group Policy Management Console (the GPMC) you can right-click on a domain and select “Search”, and a this amazing tool presents itself. This handy search tool...

I was thinking about my next blog entry a few weeks back. My research took me through various Web sites, message threads, and articles. Naturally, I wanted something not only pertinent to Group Policy, but also exciting and new (to quote the Love Boat...

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...

The scene: You want to set a registry key of a 3rd party application but you don’t want to write a custom ADMX file just to be able to configure it. Or you have some registry keys you set in logon scripts and you want to use the update interval of Group...

Hey – this is Florian from the GP Team’s MVPs again. It seems like some of you would like set up WMI filters. Let me show you how to use a tool called Scriptomatic to make it easier. Or, skip to the end to see how much faster it is to do the same thing...

New Year, New…console session? Here’s a quick look at creating a new GPO using the Group Policy cmdlets in Windows 7. To create a new GPO from scratch using PowerShell cmdlets: 1. Open an elevated PowerShell console session (1-2 clicks) ...

We had a question a couple of days ago about the usage of ADMX template formats in Windows XP/Server 2003 environments. Essentially the question was: “…What’s the supported or recommended way of getting W2k8 ADMX templates applying in a W2k3 domain with...

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...

Great News. The Group Policy team has published installation packages that distribute ADM files (below) for use with Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1. Administrative Templates for Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Download from: http://go.microsoft...

We have stated a number of times through a number of forums that its not a great practice to muck around with the Default Domain Policy and the Default Domain Controllers Policy. In fact its actually a really bad practice...same goes with the SYSVOL....

We have received numerous questions about when the Group Policy Settings Spreadsheet would be updated for the new Windows 7 ADMX settings. I am happy to announce that new version has been completed and is available from the Download Center . In addition...