This video describes the concept of “GPO Sprawl”, how it impacts you and how you can help clean up your Group Policy environment using GPO Exporter 1.5.
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22
MAY
MAY
0
While much is changing in Windows 8, the changes related to Group Policy are more modest. One of these modest changes is in the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) functionality, exposed through the Group Policy Results Wizard in GPMC. This wizard was always my first “go-to” tool when trying to troubleshoot GP Processing problems, and they’ve made it more useful in Windows 8.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the Summary tab on RSoP is completely different, as shown here:
The ...
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21
MAY
MAY
Group Policy Consolidation and Optimization just got a lot easier! GPO Exporter 1.5 Ships!
Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia
I’m proud to announce that today we released GPO Exporter 1.5. This new release represents a huge step up in the arsenal of tools for analyzing and optimizing Group Policy deployments. I can’t tell you how many IT folks come to me and ask how they can streamline and reduce the number of GPOs they have deployed. But the problem is hard, with the sheer number of settings ...
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5
APR
APR
SDM Software will be exhibiting at this year’s upcoming Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) on April 16-19th in Las Vegas! If you’re attending MMS or are thinking about it, come on by our booth (#129) on the exhibit floor Monday-Thursday. We’ll be demo-ing some cool Group Policy management solutions, including some new products that we’re getting ready to announce! I’ll be in the booth all 4 days answering questions on Group Policy and SDM’s products. In addition, I’m pleased to ...
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26
MAR
MAR
One of the cool things I like about our Group Policy Automation Engine product is the scenarios that it’s open up by providing what is essentially an automation portal into GPOs. One of those key scenarios is the ability to automate additions and changes to Group Policy Preferences Drive Mappings, which is used by organizations large and small to map user drives at logon, and is largely replacing traditional ...
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26
MAR
MAR
One of the challenges of the GPMC’s reporting is that it is not easy to find GPOs that have had Deny ACEs (Access Control Entries) set on their delegation. Deny ACEs are typically used to deny a particular user, computer or group from applying a GPO. I always recommend that they’re used on an exception basis, for the very reason that they are hard to spot after the fact and can cause increased complexity in your Group Policy deployments. Deny ACEs don’t ...
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21
FEB
FEB
![GPO Compare 2.5 (New) Demo | Group Policy Management [Video]](http://www.sdmsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gpocomparescreen1-538x218.png)
Today we released an updated version of our widely used GPO Compare product. The 2.5 release brings some cool new features and improvements over 2.0, including:
- Ability to now compare up to 4 GPOs or GPO backups, for comparing GPOs or backups against a baseline GPO
- Support for comparing GPO Exporter Snapshots, to quickly and easily find what settings have changed within a GPO environment
- Support for showing settings that are same as well ...
6
FEB
FEB
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 ...
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29
NOV
NOV
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 ...
8
JUL
JUL
This is my 2nd blog post around using the PowerShell features in the two products of SDM Software’s new GP Reporting Pak. In this post, I’ll talk about the GPO Exporter product, which, as the name implies, lets you export Group Policy settings. The cool thing about the tool is that you can tell it to export all settings across all GPOs in your domain into a single list. You can then sort that list to find ...
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22
OCT
OCT
