The blog of Darren Mar-Elia — the GPOGUY and founder of SDM Software
In addition to shipping the Troubleshooting Pak, we will be at the upcoming Microsoft TechEd show in Orlando this next week. If you are at the show, stop by and see us at our partner Special Operations Software’s booth #914!
Well, after a lot of hard work and late nights, we just shipped the GPExpert Troubleshooting Pak 1.0 last night. This is a significant milestone for the company as its our first suite of products for troubleshooting Group Policy. The Pak is composed of 4 different products that each add to an administrator’s arsenal of Group Policy troubleshooting. As a quick intro, here is what each product does:
I think the Troubleshooting Pak really raises the bar on the tools administrators have for troubleshooting Group Policy issues. Hopefully you will all think so as well. So, visit http://www.sdmsoftware.com/products.php, download the trial version, check it out and let me know what you think!
Thanks
Darren
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I read today that Microsoft has shipped the updated Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance customers that includes the DesktopStandard GPOVault product, which MS is calling "Advanced Group Policy Management". For those who don’t know, GPOVault is a Group Policy change control product that integrates into GPMC to let you do check-in and check-out of Group Policy changes before deploying them into production. If you are a Software Assurance customer, you get it as part of the DOP.
If not, well, sorry 
So, what do these three topics in the title have in common? Some might read that and think, "well, nothing". But indeed its not the case. Microsoft has kicked an open source project and one of the first tools to go into that process is a Group Polic y tool. If you are running Vista yet, then you know that the new Vista event log now provides additional application specific channels where various Windows or application components can send logging information. In terms of Group Policy, there is now the new Vista Operational Log that provides detailed Group Policy. Essentially this log replaces the userenv.log that we’re used to using for troubleshooting GP prior to Vista. The GP Operational Log in Vista provides a lot of step-by-step GP processing detail in a more readable format than the userenv.log file, but it isn’t necessarily as easy to view at-a-glance, like you can do with the text file-based userenv file.
To make reading of the Operational log easier, Microsoft has provided the GPLogView utility. This is a free command-line tool that lets you grab GP Operational log data and spit it out into text, HTML, etc. You can also subscribe to the Operational Log event channel and get events in real-time appearing in your console, which is kinda cool. Now, this is where the Open Source part comes in. The GPLogView source has been made available to the general public as part of a community called Codeplex. If you visit the site, you’ll see a number of Open Source projects related to Microsoft technology, that you can participate in. The GPLogView project is at http://www.codeplex.com/gplogview, and I’m one of the coordinators for the project. So if you’re interested in taking the GPLogView code and enhancing it or just seeing how it works, check it out!
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