Yesterday at TechEd in Barcelona, Microsoft made a slew of announcements. And buried in those announcements was the note about Group Policy Preferences. This is the name Microsoft has given to the DesktopStandard PolicyMaker extensions that they acquired last year. The good news is that these extensions are finally going to see the light of day as a free part of the OS when Server 2008 ships!!! This is HUGE because these extensions greatly add to what you can configure via Group Policy. And my understanding is that they will work on XP and above, which means that you get some of these great features without having to upgrade to Vista. In addition to adding support for new policy areas such as mapped drives, mapped printers, ini files, environment variables, shortcut distribution, local users and groups, scheduled tasks, power options, network options and IE settings, they also support much more granular filtering than you could ever get from WMI filters or security groups. This is huge because it means that there will be few things that you can’t configure on a Windows desktop using Group Policy!
Microsoft has created a whitepaper that you can download to get more detail on this new feature. This is great news!!! Cudos to the Group Policy team for making this happen!
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NOV
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.