As a Windows administrator, you almost certainly have used Group Policies to control the settings deployed to the clients of your Active Directory infrastructure. But with Group Policies getting such heavy use, not as many administrators fully understand...

In the previous post, I talked about the structure of a GPO. Now, I'll turn to the question of what a client does in order to apply the settings that we've configured in our GPOs. The processing of GPOs is initiated from the client side rather than being...

So now that we've investigated the structure of a GPO and looked at how clients know which GPOs to apply, it's time to look at how they apply them. For a client to know which GPOs are assigned to it, and in which order it should apply them, the client...

Several months ago, one of my customers came to me with a concern. It seems that certain of his users were receiving their Group Policies correctly while another group was only receiving a subset of the policies. He wasn't sure why this would be. The...

Recently, while working with a customer who was trying to understand why a Global Catalog query might be taking longer than expected, the question of the Partial Attribute Set came up. Because not everyone understood this concept, I thought I'd write...

In my earlier post, I showed how to add an attribute to the Partial Attribute Set in Active Directory. But how can you tell which attributes are already part of the Partial Attribute Set in the first place? You can certainly check each one manually, but...