Hello GP Junkies! My name is Bryan Garretson, and I want to let you know about an interesting way we were able to leverage the new PowerShell cmdlets available in Windows Server 2008 R2 / Windows 7: to anticipate and test around replication delays in...

Starter GPO's were introduced in Windows Server 2008 as a download and return in Windows Server 2008 R2 in box + more comments in the report. Jakob H. Heidelberg, a Group Policy MVP, wrote this post on Starter GPO's. His blog features the same post...

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...

Head on over to the Script Center this week (February 9-12) where the Scripting Guys are focusing on Group Policy scripting! Topics: How Can I List All Group Policy Objects in a Domain? (Mon. - 2/9/09) How Can Get a List of All My Orphaned...

I'm happy to announce that the AGPM Planning Guide is now live on our public site here . Between the overview , the planning guide and the operations guide , you should have the documentation you’ve asked us for to deploy and use AGPM. They contains information...

Derek Melber , a recently mentioned Group Policy MVP, will be giving several seminars this coming week. These seminars cover a bunch of topics, like troubleshooting, managing passwords, and controlling software installation with Group Policy. To check...

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) ...

Every now and then, as Program Manager’s for the Group Policy team, they let us out of out building to go and speak to customers and chat to them about their issues and problems. Often customer begin by outlining their pain and iterating a problem that...

Check it out for yourself!

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...

I actually wrote this post awhile ago on my blog and forgot to cross post this to the GP blog. Bad me...though I have updated it recently with new information! :) Essentially its the minimum permissions you need to run AGPM without Domain Admins access...

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...

I just blogged about this very question over on my blog . Essentially the question we hear a lot is do I need to update Schema/Active Directory/Servers/functional modes etc to support a new client OS version. I wont revisit that Sometimes theres a...

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...

We had a great customer question today on AGPM 3.0 that would probably interest quite a few of you using AGPM. "...A customer imports some GPOs [into AGPM] in order to change control them. Some of the GPOs have Deny permission for particular users...

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...

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....

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...

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...

Awhile ago we had a customer call come in. The customer had a major problem in Windows Server 2008. When they tried to map drives through a script it didnt work. The customer had initially applied a Login script as a start up script and then changed...

As noted on the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) blog announcing the latest MDOP release, AGPM 3.0 has RTM'd. For those customers licensed for MDOP, this means you'll have it in your hands around the first week of October 2008 via the MVLS site...

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...

The Group Policy team at Microsoft would like to hear from you about how you currently manage your servers and server-based applications and how you’d like manage them in the future. Please take this anonymous online survey at http://www.surveymonkey...

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...

Now available: the Group Policy Documentation Survival Guide. Print it out, laminate it, tape it to your wall. You will survive. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=117638