Well, I suppose I couldn’t help myself. I had planned on updating our cmdlets released last week to correct an omission that Richard Siddaway had kindly pointed out, namely that I didn’t have a remove-sdmgplink to go along with add-sdmgplink. So I went ahead and corrected that. I also committed a small sin by renaming one of the cmdlets, but I swear I had to. Microsoft’s current naming standards for common verbs have a few gaps, as far as I’m concerned. Namely, they have a verb called export, which is supposed to encompass backups. Well, they also have a verb called import, which is the pair to export, of course. Problem is, GPMC considers imports as distinctly different from a restore of a backup. So, my use of import-sdmgpo as a way of restoring a backup would become problematic down the line, when I add support for true GPMC imports. So I opted for changing import-sdmgpo to restore-sdmgpo. Restore is supposed to be paired with "Checkpoint" but that didn’t make a whole lot of sense in my case, so I chose to ignore that .

And of course, along the way I found at least 3 other cmdlets that I could add, so I did. At this point its probably worthwhile to summarize what is currently in the Snap-in. We now have 12 cmdlets, as follows:

Add-SDMgplink: Links a GPO to a particular AD container (site,domain or OU)
*Get-SDMgplink: Retrieves a list of linked GPOs from a particular AD container
*Remove-SDMgplink: Removes a GPO link from a given AD container
Export-SDMgpo: Backs up a GPO to a given folder path
Get-SDMgpo: Retrieves information about one or all GPOs in a domain
New-SDMgpo: Creates a new GPO in a domain
Remove-SDMgpo: Deletes an existing GPO from a domain
Restore-SDMgpo: Restores a GPO from backup
*Get-SDMgpoBackups: Retrieves the list of all backed-up GPOs (or a given GPO) from a given folder path
Add-SDMgpoSecurity: Adds a GP permission (ACE) for a given group to a given GPO
Get-SDMgpoSecurity: Retrieves a list of GP permissions from a given GPO
Remove-SDMgpoSecurity: Removes a particular permission for a given group from a given GPO.

* new cmdlet for this release

 Ok, so if you’ve already installed the first version of this, go ahead and remove that from Add/Remove Programs and reinstall the new version that’s out on www.sdmsoftware.com/freeware.php . Everything should be the same except what I’ve noted above.

 Thanks and as always, feedback is good. Email Support (at) sdmsoftware (dot)  com if you have questions or issues.

Tags:

PowerShell, Group Policy, GPMC