You may be asking yourself, “What does infrastructure status have to do with Group Policy”. Well, group policy depends on other technologies to ensure that policy settings are replicated throughout your environment so that end users / computers...

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...

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...

Last week I finished my ramblings about Power Management and Group Policy. I decided to change this week’s discussion…sort of. My earlier blogs were about new registry-based policy settings. However, this week I want to focus on security policy settings...

In a previous post, Lilia wrote an Introduction to Windows PowerShell Cmdlets in Windows 7 . Windows PowerShell is a command-line shell and scripting language that helps IT professionals achieve greater productivity and control system administration more...

It’s come to my attention (in a blunt object kind of way) that you’ve been waiting to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7, bypassing Windows Vista. In case you’ve done the same with your servers, you’ve got some fun work coming up (but lots of cool features...

Here’s a quick follow-up to our last post on the existence of GPO search . One of our MVPs, Alan, has a great post up about a Group Policy Search webapp (Previously mentioned on this blog ). It includes instructions on how to install a Windows Search...

Michael has covered “least privilege” for AGPM before (the Active Directory team followed up with a bit more detail). However, those scenarios are for single-domains. What if you have a forest where you want to manage all the child domains using AGPM...

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...

Group Policy in Windows Server 2012: Using Remote GPUpdate If someone calls to say their computer doesn’t work quite right, the first thing you might have them do is run gpupdate /force to ensure they have the latest policy applied to their system. Now...

This post was written by Judith, a technical writer for Group Policy. This will be the first post in a series on ways to use Powershell with Group Policy I wanted to play around with the Group Policy cmdlets. These are installed on Windows Server 2008...

Just had a question come through about 'Restricted Groups'. One of the original extensions to GP, increadibly powerful and helpful to admins who need to have better control over local group memberships. There are some scenarios that 'Restricted Groups...

A customer reported an issue to me recently where the customer reported that when using AGPM 3.0, each time they deployed out to production, their GPLinks were being destroyed. Why is this occurring? What’s probably relevant here is to outline what...

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?...

I was reading GP MVP Darren Mar-Elia’s forum about WMI Filters and discovered a sweet PowerShell trick from another awesome friend of the GP team, Thorbjörn Sjövold (CTO of Specops Software ) You can use the PowerShell cmdlet “measure...

Vista has the Power: Part 1 of 2 Last week I wrote about the policy settings that you use to control the Event Logging service. As promised, this week we move to the wonderful world of policy controlled Power Management. Windows Vista provides...

As part of the official announcement on the MDOP blog , Advanced Group Policy Management 4.0 (AGPM) will be releasing in October to customers. With this release we had strong feedback on two main areas of improvement and an additional area that improves...

Hi GP fanatics, Did you know that you can import/export WMI filters using GPMC? Yes, you can; however, you must do it one filter at a time. You export each filter to a single .mof file. You can then take this .mof file to a new or different domain...

The latest Group Policy settings reference spreadsheet that covers the available administrative template settings and security settings for Windows Server “8” Beta, Windows 8 Consumer Preview and all earlier versions of Windows is now available in the...

There is new content lurking in the Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) TechNet Library . Stop by for information about everything from choosing which version to install to how to back up and restore the archive. What’s new and choosing which version...

Wow, its already Wednesday; time for another entry. Last week I wrote about the new user profile policy settings for Windows Vista. This week, I want to highlight a couple policy settings included in the Windows Logon Options. The Windows Logon...

We've mentioned managing power a couple times here on the blog, including a brief introduction and a detailed step-by-step walk through by Alan Burchill (shows how to configure power options that consider Business Hours vs . Off Hours using Group Policy...

Ok, its time for another update in the continuous saga of new Group Policy settings included with Windows Vista. This week I am going to focus on policy settings for the Event Logging Service. For clarity, these settings control the Event Logging...

Now that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 have been released, we’d like to share with you some of the exciting enhancements that we’ve added for Group Policy. While we hear plenty of great things from people who use Group Policy, we also hear complaints...

We often have groups of customers come to Redmond to visit and provide their feedback about the direction in which we are taking our products. Recently, a group of folks joined us for a few days to talk specifically about the desktop and its direction...