Microsoft has finally shipped some ADMX template files for configuring Office 2007! They are available here. That’s good news–now you can use the new template format to customize Office 2007 deployments in your Vista environments without dragging around ADM files in every GPO.
As you may know, one of the downsides of the old ADM files is that they were copied into the SYSVOL portion of each GPO that used them. This meant a lot of duplicate ADM files in your GPOs, replicating 2-3MB of stuff to every DC. ADMX files do away with that in Vista and Windows Server 2008. When you’re editing GPOs in those environments, the ADMX files are referenced from either the c:windowspolicydefinitions location or from something called the Central Store. The "Central Store" is a folder you create manually in SYSVOL (or you can use my free Central Store Creator Utility) and can be referenced by any administrator editing policy from Vista or Server 2008. Now that Microsoft has shipped Office ADMX files, you don’t have to have Office ADMs running around every GPO in SYSVOL–you can put them in your Central Store and away you go!
Tags
Group Policy, Microsoft Office 2007, ADMX, GPOGUY
OCT
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.