The blog of Darren Mar-Elia — the GPOGUY and founder of SDM Software
Last week I did a series of GP Troubleshooting blog entries for the folks at Realtime Publishers. I posted 4 blog entries that walk through, step-by-step, the process I typically use when helping someone troubleshoot a GP problem. Many of these techniques are encapsulated in SDM Software’s GPExpert Troubleshooting Pak, but you can read the blog entries and check it out yourself. They are at the following links:
Enjoy!
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For those who haven’t seen the news, it was just announced this morning: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080912/20080912005372.html?.v=1
Our little part of the world just got a little smaller and the folks who brought you DEC are now part of a much larger company.
If I may make some observations, I think this kind of activity, while inevitable, is both good and bad for all involved. Certainly whenever there is consolidation in the market like this, in the short term, customers lose choices. Its common practice for a given customer to go to several vendors when looking for a solution, and whenever the choices get fewer (esp. when #1 buys #2), the customer loses for a period of time. But the beauty of the market is that other, nimbler and smaller vendors now have an opportunity to compete when they may not have before. Instead of having one big (Quest) and one pretty good sized (Netpro) AD vendor to talk to, now customers have one really big AD vendor and a lot of smaller ones. But trust me, the void fills quickly.
Perhaps the toughest part of all of this is the impact to employees. Right now, I suspect there is a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt within the ranks of both companies around the products that both have in common and that is probably the biggest immediate negative of any aquisition. Since I know many folks in both organizations, I hope that they are all doing well and that things clear up quickly. Its a painful process to go through and the best that can happen is that it happens quickly!
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Starting today, I’ll be guest blogging at http://www.realtime-windowsserver.com/ on Group Policy troubleshooting. I’m doing a series of blog items on the steps that you can go through to successfully troubleshoot Group Policy. Check it out!
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I’ve seen a lot of interest in Group Policy Preferences since its release, and a lot of confusion about whether you can use it if you don’t have Windows Server 2008 in your environment (you can!) so I thought it would be useful to create a quick whitepaper on the basic requirements for this feature, and what things it can do. Check it out at the GPOGUY.COM Whitepaper page.
Enjoy!
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I thought this Information Week article did a good job of articulating the challenges of security compliance on Windows, and the use of Group Policy as the first line of defense here. Most folks have been using GP to lockdown their desktop systems for a while now, but the reality is that Group Policy is THE mechanism for managing security configuration if your targets are Windows desktops and servers. However, there are challenges that folks have to deal with, as the article points out. Knowing whether policy actually worked across your environment, especially for sensitive security configurations, is a tough problem to solve. Its one of the reasons that we have been working to release the Group Policy Compliance Agent, which is a new product that will run on your Windows servers and desktops, and will collect vital statistics about GP processing. Most importantly, the agent will be able to optionally validate that settings that are reported by Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) have actually been made successfully in the system’s registry or security configuration. This will go a long way towards closing the loop between setting policy, and hoping that it has actually applied, let alone being able to prove it to your auditors!
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