Archive for 'Group Policy Preferences'

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Leveraging Group Policy Preferences Item-Level Targeting from “Downlevel” Group Policy

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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 ...

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24
OCT
5

Categories: General Stuff, Group Policy, Group Policy Management, Group Policy Preferences, Tips & Tricks, Uncategorized

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Group Policy: Policy vs. Preferences — what does it all mean?

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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 ...

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8
SEP
3

Categories: General Stuff, Group Policy Management, Group Policy Preferences

Find Group Policy (GPO) Setting Conflicts using PowerShell

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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
0

Categories: Cool New Products, Group Policy, Group Policy Preferences, PowerShell

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Disabling Print Screen through Group Policy

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Recently someone asked if it was possible to disable the print screen functionality on their keyboard through Group Policy. My initial response was that I had never seen a policy setting to do this, and indeed I figured that you would need to do some low level trapping of keyboard commands to make this work. That is, until I discovered the Keyboard Scancode Map. The Scancode Map is a way of assigning (and unassigning) functionality ...

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1
OCT
0

Categories: Group Policy Preferences, Security-related

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Using GP Preferences to protect against the zero-day shortcut vulnerability

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Microsoft recently announced a new security vulnerability in Windows shortcuts that affects all versions of Windows since XP! Its references here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2286198. This particular vulnerability takes advantage of the icon that appears in shortcut (.lnk and .pif) files on Windows. Within the article cited above, Microsoft provides a “FixIt” workaround for the problem that essentially removes the icon from the shortcut, leaving a blank icon in its place. In looking at what they are doing in the FixIt, it ...
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23
JUL
0

Categories: General Stuff, Group Policy Preferences, Security-related

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Controlling shares on Windows systems

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Well, I’ve been crazy busy working on some new product releases but I wanted to take a moment to blog about some useful features in GP Preferences that often slip through the cracks. I saw a blog post today about how you could use a custom ADM file to remove administrative shares on Windows systems. This works pretty well, but I always prefer it when Group Policy makes it really easy for me to manage configuration, and GP ...

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22
JUN
1

Categories: Group Policy Preferences, Security-related

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RSoP & GP Preferences

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I was playing around with some scenarios related to "item-level targeting" (ILT) in Group Policy Preferences and was reminded of a significant limitation in this newer as it relates to Resultant Set of Policy reporting. What I was doing was creating a GPO that contains some GP Preferences registry settings, and then using item-level targeting to control which machine groups got those registry settings. However, when I went into GPMC and ran a GP Results (RSoP) report against one of my ...

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29
NOV
0

Categories: Group Policy Preferences

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Automating GP Preferences

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In a recent posting on the Activedir.org mailing list, I happened to mention that we’re getting ready to release v. 2.0 of our GPExpert(r) Scripting Toolkit. The Toolkit is actually getting a new name, but I won’t spoil the surprise for now. However, the key feature we’ve added to it is support for the new Group Policy Preferences (GPP) settings! This is pretty exciting because this now means that you can use PowerShell or .Net to automate ...

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26
FEB
0

Categories: Group Policy Preferences

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Group Policy Preferences and the Registry

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So, the other day I was trading some email with a friend and mentioned that I was working on a nifty little utility to allow someone to import the contents of a .reg file into Group Policy Preferences registry extensions using the command-line. He commented that it sounded interesting but that the GP Preferences UI already supported something like this. So I thought I’d play around with it and see exactly how this works. He was right of course (mostly because ...

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12
FEB
4

Categories: Group Policy Preferences

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Whitepaper on Group Policy Preferences

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I’ve seen a lot of interest in Group Policy Preferences since its release, and a lot of confusion about whether you can use it if you don’t have Windows Server 2008 in your environment (you can!) so I thought it would be useful to create a quick whitepaper on the basic requirements for this feature, and what things it can do. Check it out at the GPOGUY.COM Whitepaper page.

Enjoy!

 

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Group Policy Preferences, GPOGUY

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4
SEP
0

Categories: Group Policy Preferences

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