Group Policy Team Blog

We already talked about Darren's tool to investigate Group Policy performance , so here's what some other GP MVPs are up to: Jeremy Moskowitz blogs about how to use his product, PolicyPak , to disable various 3rd party software through Group Policy...

You can make decisions as you design and deploy your Group Policy Objects (GPOs) that will have an impact on how quickly your Windows desktops start and become usable to your users. Some of these decisions are obvious, while many are not. This post will...

We have a new document in our technet library. The Core Network Companion Guide has a section specifically about Group Policy Deployment . Check it out! Or just take a look at James McIllece’s blog post summarizing the deployment guide companion .

This blog post is written by Judith, our technical writer, and based on an old blog post by Jeffrey Snover. ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2007/01/11/sorting-out-groupby.aspx ) Jeffrey wrote a piece that showed how to sort system services...

  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...

  Another change we made in Windows Server 2012 is in the Resultant Set of Policy reports. In previous versions of Server, you had to look at the results report, and the event log, and the tracing logs to find all the information you needed about...

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...

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...

The Group Policy settings reference spreadsheet that covers the available administrative template settings and security settings for Windows Server 2012, Windows 8, and all earlier versions of Windows is now available in the download center here: http...

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...

You might have seen GP MVP Jeremy Moskowitz’s post on how to recycle GPO comments . While Jeremy points out you can do this without a script…. You can also do it with a script! Our tech writer, Judith, walks us through the process:   After I import...

This post was written by Judith, a technical writer for Group Policy. This is the second post in a series on ways to use Powershell with Group Policy. See the first post on getting started with RSAT and Group Policy Let’s say I have a forest and I’d like...

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...

Jeff Hicks, one of Microsoft’s Powershell MVPs, has written a great script for managing GPO backups : The GroupPolicy module from Microsoft offers a great deal of functionality from a command line. In terms of regular maintenance or administration it...

Ashley McGlone has a great script up for merging GPOs together through powershell. I wish I had this script five years ago. At the time I was searching for a way to combine or merge GPOs, but there simply wasn’t a way to do it. And today there still isn...

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...

Tales from the Community – Deleting registry values Okay, I've seen this question in the Technet Forums that basically goes like this: " Hey I have this reg script that deletes a value off the registry for me. The .reg file does [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT...

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...

We've got two new videos for you! The TechNet guys dropped by to ask Lilia some questions (always a good idea, in my opinion), and in return she dropped some knowledge. http://edge.technet.com/Media/Group-Policy-Search-with-Lilia/ - Did you know...

I do not know about you but I LOVE PowerShell, especially the Group Policy cmdlets. Unfortunately, I didn’t have too many opportunities to really use them - but luckily got a chance in preparation for a presentation where I would demo a script that...

Hey, Scripting Guy! has a great series of posts around Group Policy & scripting: Using group policy cmdlets for backup and restore Test AD replication with group policy cmdlets How to compare 2 GPOs offline ( Part II )

Kapil posted a great article about a new tool created by Stephanus Schulte and Jean-Pierre Regente. It's an Azure-hosted tool that keyword searches Group Policy settings. Read about it here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2010/06/24/announcing...

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...

Darren Mar-Elia, aka GPOGuy, wrote a cool post about using Group Policy Preferences to remove unwanted network shares from your environment. Group Policy Preferences can do everything! If you've got Windows Server 2008 or above, you've already got GP...

Thanks for tuning in this lovely Friday! Time for a glimpse into the advanced side of Group Policy, with Advanced Group Policy Management . This awesome product comes as part of MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack), which you can get easily if you...