Keep up-to-date on Group Policy by reading Darren Mar-Elia’s Group Policy Blog
Group Policy Freeware Products
SDM Software’s collection of freeware Group Policy-related products, including tools, utilities, and scriptlets.
GPExpert™ Group Policy Health Cmdlet 1.2 UPDATED!
PowerShell-based utility that lets you quickly and easily determine Group Policy processing health across computers within your environment. Reports out quick “red or green” status of GP processing on end-nodes and provides detailed listing of GPOs that apply to a given computer or user and which Client Side Extensions have run. Leverages PowerShell for easy integration into existing automation processes.
Register to Download the GP Health Cmdlet
GPO Deny Finder 1.0
This GUI utility lets you quickly and easily find GPOs in a domain that have Deny Access Control Entries set on them. Runs on Win7 or Server 2008-R2 with .Net Framework 3.5.
Register to Download the GPO Deny Finder
SDM GPMC PowerShell Cmdlets 1.3 & 1.4
Description:These cmdlets wrap the functionality around managing Group Policy Objects available within the GPMC, into handy PowerShell cmdlets. This version comes with 25 cmdlets (in the Vista+ version) for performing GPO management tasks like creating and deleting GPOs, linking them to sites, domains and OUs, modifying GPO and SOM security and backing up, importing and restoring GPOs. For more information on using these cmdlets, check out Darren Mar-Elia’s Group Policy Blog
This free set of cmdlets is a great compliment to our commercial GPExpert Scripting Toolkit for PowerShell, which provides a cmdlet for modifying the settings within a GPO–something GPMC can’t do! You can get more information on the Scripting Toolkit on the Products Page.
Requirements: This utility requires .Net 2.0 and PowerShell 1.0 or PowerShell 2.0 to be installed before installation. It also requires GPMC (which requires .Net 1.1 or later) to be installed on the system where the cmdlets run.
Register to Download the SDM GPMC PowerShell Cmdlets
SDM Group Policy Refresh Cmdlet 1.0
Description:This PowerShell cmdlet lets you trigger remote Group Policy refreshes on Windows systems running Windows 2000 and above. Its the PowerShell version of the popular RGPRefresh utility on our GPOGuy.com website.
Requirements: This utility requires .Net 2.0 and PowerShell 1.0 to be installed before installation.
Register to Download the SDM GP Refresh Cmdlet
Clean Registry Policy Utility 1.1
Description:The Clean Registry Policy utility is a command-line tool for listing and removing registry policies, preferences and Software Restriction Policies. You can list each type of registry policy from the tool and then optionally remove each type (or all types). This tool is unique in that normally there is no easy way to remove preferences–those Administrative Template policies that fall outside of the four special policy keys that Microsoft provides. Preferences tattoo the registry until they are explicitly removed or disabled. This utility lets you remove all preferences that were previously set on a machine. In addition, this utility can help you clean a system that has been removed from a domain and still has “orphaned” registry policy entries that are causing problems. You can view all of the command-line switches available on the tool by typing cleanregpol /?.
Requirements: This utility requires .Net 2.0 to be installed on each system where it runs. In addition the user running the tool must be a member of the local administrators group on the machine where it runs. Note that the tool can be run in Task Scheduler as well.
