Anyone that manages Group Policy probably knows about the gpupdate.exe utility that ships with Windows. GPUpdate’s job in life is to refresh Group Policy manually, rather than relying on Windows to do it on it’s own schedule. This can be a useful troubleshooting tool if you’re trying to determine whether a GP update has been received by a client machine. The version of GPUpdate in Windows 7 includes a number of ...
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Just a quick note before the weekend starts to let folks know I updated the GPOGUY.COM WMI Filter Test Utility to include timing information (see below).
Specifically, this lets you see how long a given WMI filter took to evaluate on the target system, so you can see roughly how long it will take to evaluate during GP Processing. This means that now you can not only test your WMI filters against real target systems to see if they evaluate ...
Recently a fellow Group Policy MVP asked about whether it was possible to control the order of Client-Side Extension (CSE) processing in Group Policy. The CSEs are the DLLs that do the real work of policy processing in GP. They reside on all Windows client machines and each policy area (e.g. software installation, folder redirection, security, admin templates, all the various Group Policy Preferences areas, etc.) has a CSE that does it’s bidding.
With the exception of Admin Templates, which always ...
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Sometimes I’m reminded that, even though Microsoft has been shipping their Group Policy PowerShell module for a while now, it is missing some key functionality. Fortunately, it took someone else asking me a question about how they could script something in PowerShell to realize that our SDM GPMC cmdlets, which have been around since about 2008, have a pretty good set of functionality even in the era of Microsoft’s own module! The question I had today was, “how can ...
Continue Reading →Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia
If you’re going to be at TechEd North America next week, stop by and say hello. I’ll be manning the Microsoft Windows 7 & MDOP booth on Tue morning and then presenting on Group Policy and VDI on Thursday afternoon. That session will cover some of the things you can do with Group Policy to optimize VDI deployments as well as things to avoid when using GP to manage VDI-based desktops. Hope to see you there!
Darren
Continue Reading →Just a quick reminder to let folks know that I’ll be on the Talk Technet Episode tomrrow (Mar-30) morning at 9am (GMT-8) to take questions on Group Policy. Hope you can join me! Register here:
Thanks
Darren
Continue Reading →Sometimes you want to know how many GPOs you have in a domain. Powershell provides a way to do this quickly and easily. Earlier today I tweeted about the way to do this in Windows 7 or Server 2008-R2, using the Microsoft-provided “GroupPolicy” PowerShell Module. Its as simple as:
(Get-GPO -All).Count
However, if you are not yet on these newer OS versions, you can still get this information from PowerShell. Specifically, my free PowerShell GPMC cmdlets provide nearly identical syntax ...
Continue Reading →If you aren’t already following my twitter feed (@grouppolicyguy) then here’s a new reason to do so. I’m posting quick Group Policy “Tips of the Day” on Twitter, for as long as I can think of them 
. Check them out and let me know what you think!
Darren
Continue Reading →Someone asked me recently what I thought of using Deny ACEs on GPOs for security group filtering. First, a little background.
As you probably know, you can control which users and computers will process a particular GPO by using security filtering on that GPO. The GPMC exposes this through the “security filtering” dialog on the Scope pane of a particular GPO, as shown below:
Saw this site put up by Citrix today–www.ipadsatwork.com. I thought it was an interesting approach–pitching iPads in the enterprise by making the iPad a glorified dumb terminal, via the Citrix Receiver, for accessing your Windows desktop and apps. While I agree that this overcomes a lot of challenges around managing iPads on enterprise networks, it sort of ignores the elephant in the room–one of the biggest values of the iPad is running iPad apps! And ond of the biggest ...
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