Microsoft has publicly released their Group Policy Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) tool. This tool is designed to collect GP-related data from remote nodes and provide you with some ideas of things to be concerned about as it relates to Group Policy. I encourage everyone to check out the tool. In some respects, it seeks to do some of the same things that SDM Software’s GPExpert Health Reporter does. I looked at the GP BPA when it was still in beta, and I must confess that I am, not surprisingly, partial to the Health Reporter for doing this kind of analysis. The problem I had and still have with the BPA is that it presents the information, while useful, in an almost incomprehensible format. It also presents so much information so as to not be very actionable. Hopefully MS will improve the tool over time but I would have a hard time recommending its use to anyone, unless they are truly a GP guru and can understand exactly what they are seeing.
In addition, I did some initial tests in my test environment using the BPA and I have to say that it appears to lack some QA before its delivery. For example, in one test I did against an XP, SP2 workstation, I got a number of warnings with the following text:
"GP_LINK is for cpandl.com"
Clearly it was trying to tell me something about a gplink attribute on the domain level, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what 
. It also warned me that GPrefresh was unsuccessful but returned with error code 0 (that usually means things worked ok) and then told me it took 60 seconds for the refresh. When I ran the same test from the Health Reporter tool against the same machine, it returned a red status and indicated that Folder Redirection had failed for the currently logged on user, something I did not get from the GP BPA. The GP BPA also presents some really confusing data–and I say that as someone who sorta gets what’s going on under the covers in GP. For example, the screen shot below shows a report on that XP node, and frankly, I’m not sure what its trying to tell me, esp. when it says "Any = true".
In any case, I’m happy that MS is putting *something* out there to help folks, and its free!. Check it out.
Technorati Tags
Group Policy, Group Policy BPA, GPExpert Health Reporter, Group Policy Troubleshooting
AUG
About the Author:
Darren Mar-Elia is CTO & Founder of SDM Software, Inc. Darren has over 25 years of IT and Software experience in the Microsoft technology area, including serving as a Director in Infrastructure at Charles Schwab, CTO of Windows Management Solutions at Quest Software, and Sr. Director of Product Engineering at DesktopStandard. He has been a Microsoft MVP in Group Policy technology for the last 6 years and has written and spoken on Active Directory, Group Policy and PowerShell topics frequently over the years. He maintains the popular Group Policy resource web site at www.gpoguy.com and has been a contributing editor for Windows IT Pro Magazine since 1997. He has written and contributed to twelve books on Windows. Darren also speaks frequently at conferences on Windows infrastructure topics.