PowerShell | Group Policy Administration | SDM Software | Group Policy Management & Administration Tools

Group Policy Health PowerShell Cmdlet Updated!

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

1

Categories: Group Policy, Group Policy Management, Group Policy Tools, MMS 2012, PowerShell, sdm software

Tags: Group Policy, PowerShell

Automating Group Policy Preferences Drive Mapping with PowerShell

Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia

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

0

Categories: Cool New Products, Group Policy, Group Policy Management, Group Policy Tools, PowerShell, sdm software, Tips & Tricks, Videos

Tags: Group Policy, Group Policy Automation, Group Policy Tools, PowerShell, sdm software

GPO Compare 2.5 (New) Demo | Group Policy Management [Video]

Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia

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 ...

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6
FEB

0

Categories: Cool New Products, Group Policy, Group Policy Management, Group Policy Tools, PowerShell, Videos

Tags: GPO Compare, group policy management

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

3

Categories: GPMC, Group Policy Management, Group Policy Tools, PowerShell, WMI Filters

Tags: group policy management, PowerShell, WMI Filters

Comparing GPOs to a Baseline Using GPO Compare

Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia

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

0

Categories: Cool New Products, Group Policy Management, Group Policy Tools, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks

Tags: GPO Compare, Group Policy, PowerShell, sdm software

SDM GPMC Cmdlets Updated to Support PowerShell v.2

Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia

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 ...

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26
SEP

16

Categories: General Stuff, GPMC, Group Policy Management, Group Policy Tools, PowerShell

Retrieving GPO Links with PowerShell

Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia

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 ...

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8
JUN

3

Categories: GPMC, Group Policy, PowerShell

Tags: GPMC, Group Policy, PowerShell

Getting Group Policy Counts with PowerShell

Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia

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 ...

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14
MAR

0

Categories: GPMC, PowerShell

Tags: GPMC, Group Policy, PowerShell

Performing Bulk GPO Renames

Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia

Someone recently asked about the best way to perform bulk GPO renames. Of course, there are probably many reasons why you would want to do this (e.g. moving to a standard naming convention, cleaning up mis-named GPOs, etc.) but for my money, there is one technology that makes this easy–PowerShell!

There are (at least) two ways to do this in PowerShell, depending upon which version of Windows you have. If you are in a Windows 7 or Server 2008-R2 world, then the ...

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18
NOV

0

Categories: General Stuff, Group Policy, PowerShell, Uncategorized

Tags: GPO Rename, Group Policy, PowerShell, sdm software

Find Group Policy (GPO) Setting Conflicts using PowerShell

Posted by: Darren Mar-Elia

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

Tags: Group Policy;GPO Exporter;PowerShell;