Well, 2011 is almost over, and it’s a been a great year for SDM Software. We achieved record revenue results this year–smashing last year’s total by over 300%– and have over 150 customers to thank for our continued success. This is in addition to the 100os of folks that have downloaded our Group Policy free tools at GPOGUY.COM and SDM Software’s Freeware Page. Our Group Policy solutions such as the Continue Reading →
Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia
WMI Filters have been available as a mechanism for filtering the effects of Group Policy Objects (GPOs) since Server 2003 & XP shipped. They are a valuable tool in your Group Policy Management arsenal. As the name implies, WMI filters allow you to filter the effects of a GPO based on queries that execute against the WMI repository on a given client machine (server or workstation). A WMI filter needs to be expressed in terms of a WMI Query ...
Continue Reading →One of the cool things about our GPO Compare product is it’s support for PowerShell. The product ships with a PowerShell cmdlet called Compare-SDMGPO that lets you compare live and backed-up GPOs–just like the GUI. We can use this capability to automate the comparison of live GPOs to baseline backups. For example, let’s say you have a baseline template GPO backup from one of Microsoft’s best practices security guides and you want to know if your live GPOs ...
Continue Reading →Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia
I spent the last two days at Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, sitting in on sessions and talking to vendors that produce solutions in this space. As a backdrop to this, I’ve spent a fair bit of time over the past several months working with customers who are evaluating their cloud strategy, especially as it relates to private cloud. What is the “private cloud”, you ask? First, a little disclaimer…
As a long-time IT pro as well as ...
Continue Reading →Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia
Recently I’ve had some conversations with folks that related to their irritation that “legacy” Group Policy settings such as Admin. Templates, Security Settings, Software Installation, etc. could not benefit from the fine-grained “Item-Level-Targeting” (ILT) feature that is available with Group Policy Preferences settings. Most of us Group Policy MVPs have had this on our wish list for a while, and, understanding GP structure and internals the way I do, I realized that this would not be an easy fix for ...
Continue Reading →Someone at Microsoft was kind enough to put together a nice list of all the various ADMX files that Microsoft product groups provide for extending Administrative Templates within Group Policy. Bravo for him doing this work:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4976.aspx
Enjoy!
Darren
Continue Reading →When we created our GPMC PowerShell cmdlets in 2008, they made it easy to get at GPMC functionality within PowerShell v1. When Microsoft shipped Windows 7/2008-R2, they also provided their own set of GPMC-related cmdlets within their GroupPolicy module. At the time I assumed that most folks would continue to use our cmdlets on PowerShell v1 and especially on non-Win7 systems, but as it turns out, we still have a lot of folks using our cmdlets instead of Microsoft ones– most ...
Continue Reading →I recently had a good conversation with a fellow Group Policy MVP about the difference between policies and preferences (i.e. Group Policy Preferences). He asserted that with preferences, the “user can work around the settings (generally.)”. This got me thinking about what the difference really is between a policy and a preference, in the context of Group Policy. At the end of the day, what Group Policy delivers in terms of configurations settings are subject to the rules of the ...
Continue Reading →![GPO Exporter Demonstration [Video]](http://www.sdmsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Screen-shot-2012-01-22-at-4.12.36-PM-506x218.png)
In this video, Darren Mar-Elia, SDM Software’s CTO and Founder, demonstrates the SDM Software GPO Exporter product, a tool that quickly and easily document your Group Policy Environment. Whether you are trying to discover an existing environment, find overlapping or redundant settings to prepare for a GPO cleanup, or just need to know where a particular setting is coming from, the Exporter makes the job easy. And with the PowerShell ...
Continue Reading →Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia
In this video, Darren Mar-Elia, SDM Software’s CTO and Founder, demonstrates the SDM Software GPO Compare product, a tool for being able to perform actions such as comparing group policy objects across your Windows enterprise network and creating reports about GPOs. GPO Compare greatly improves the manageability of group policy.
This Darren Mar-Elia CTO and Founder of SDM Software and the GPOGUY.com website. SDM Software is the leader in solutions for Group Policy Management and today I’m going to walk you through a quick demo of our innovative GPO Compare tool. GPO Compare let’s you compare live or backed up GPO’s and provides a lot of great interactive functionality for quickly finding GPO differences. It works against one or more trusted AD domains and let’s you generate nicely formatted reports in PDF or Excel for showing to management. There is also a PowerShell interface that let’s you do command line comparisons and manipulation of that difference data. So let’s take a tour through the product now.
I’m going to go ahead and choose to compare two live GPO’s. I’m going to browse my current active directory domain and go down and choose for example the default domain controller’s policy and I think I will compare that to the default domain policy in my domain. If I go ahead and run the comparison you will see it goes out, talks to my domain and grab those GPO’s and prepares a difference report for them. I could have also chosen to do comparison between a live GPO and a GPMC back up or two GPMC back ups, this lets me be able to compare live GPOs versus GPO back ups from un-trusted domains so lets go ahead and scroll up to the top of each tree and as you can see we have got some differences here.
The metadata section is the kind of general information related to the GPO’s such as its version modified time where it ...
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