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
I was reading Paul Thurrott’s most recent column on the Windows IT Pro Magazine website today. The column ostensibly talked about naming of features and products in Windows 8, but at the bottom, was this interesting tidbit,
“Blurring the lines in a way that’s almost diabolical, Microsoft recently announced that it’s introducing yet another form of PC/device management that will somewhat straddle the line between device-based management through EAS and full PC management with Active ...Continue Reading →
1
MAY
MAY
Just a quick note that I finally got around to updating our freeware Group Policy Health Cmdlet to add module support for PowerShell v2. Hopefully this makes the cmdlet more discoverable for those of you using it in PowerShell v2 (probably everybody!). The module name is SDM-GPOHealth, so after running the install, just open PowerShell v2 and type:
import-module SDM-GPOHealth and you’ll be good to go!
And for more info on using the Health cmdlet, check out my Continue Reading →
15
APR
APR
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
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
Digging Into Group Policy WMI Filters and Managing them through PowerShell
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 ...
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14
DEC
DEC
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
