07.19.10
Posted in Cool New Products at 4:43 am by Administrator
This last week, we (SDM Software) released a new version of GPO Compare and a brand new product in GPO Exporter. Why are these significant? Well, first off, GPO Compare now provides full support for all GP settings that were included in Win7 and Server 2008-R2, including GP Preferences. It also includes the ability to compare live GPOs to GPO backups (or any combination therein). And, it provides the ability to view those differences either in a tree view that looks much like GPO Editor, or in a grid view. You can also search for settings within the difference reports by keyword. Perhaps as exciting for you scripting junkies, both GPO Compare and GPO Exporter provides PowerShell cmdlets that let you perform comparisons or GPO exports from the command-line. Cool! So, what is GPO Exporter? Well, as the name implies, its a tool for letting you export settings from your GPOs. Think of it as part documentation/inventory tool and part real-time GP search tool. You can use the Exporter to dump all of the settings across all of your GPOs into a big list. Then you can search and sort that list to discover interesting things like redundant settings across GPOs, particular settings that you might be looking for but aren’t sure which GPO they reside in, etc. The Exporter also lets you dump GPO settings that you select to CSV file. This is kinda cool because if you are trying to consolidate your GPOs down to a smaller number, you can essentially pick settings out using GPO Exporter, export them to CSV, and use those as input for new GPO creation by leveraging our Group Policy Automation Engine (GPAE). Double-cool. So, check out these two new/updated products on our website and let me know what you think!
Darren
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10.27.09
Posted in Cool New Products at 3:14 pm by Administrator
On my twitter site: http://twitter.com/grouppolicyguy
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06.19.09
Posted in Cool New Products at 1:58 pm by Administrator
For those of you waiting patiently to migrate your PolicyMaker settings to the new GP Preferences format, your wait is over! You can now download the migration tool here! And here’s a good blog post on how it all works.
Darren
Tags:
Group Policy, Group Policy Preferences, PolicyMaker
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11.21.08
Posted in Cool New Products at 12:58 pm by Administrator
Today we shipped our new GPO Compare 1.0 product. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while–provide a standalone product to help IT administrators quickly find inconsistencies between GPOs. With GPO Compare, I think we’ve delivered a cool new standalone product with some neat features that you won’t find anywhere else. The first main difference is that we show you each GPO you are comparing in a navigable tree view that looks like the GP Editor namespace. This makes it easy to find settings within a particular GPO. But to make it easier to find differences, we let you jump from a difference item within the difference report right to the spot in the GPO tree view where the setting is found, and then let you jump to the same difference in the other GPO. We also provide reporting so that you can output differences to PDF or Excel for further manipulation and reporting. All-in-all, I’m excited about this product and some of the things we have planned for it down the line.
Check it out and let me know what you think! And have a good weekend!
Tags:
Group Policy, GPO Compare, SDM Software
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03.18.08
Posted in Cool New Products at 9:27 am by Administrator
Windows IT Pro Magazine has a good article this month on 3rd-party Group Policy tools. It goes over the challenges of Group Policy management and then talks about some of the various solutions in the space. I got a few quotes in there as well, which is cool. Check it out at:
http://windowsitpro.com/Windows/Articles/ArticleID/98087/pg/1/1.html
Tags:
Group Policy, Group Policy Tools, SDM Software, Windows IT Pro
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03.17.08
Posted in Cool New Products at 3:38 pm by Administrator
The guys over at BeyondTrust have come out with a cool new (and free) tool for helping folks get to "least privileged use" (i.e., users are not admins on their workstations) on Windows more quickly. This product is a nice compliment to their Privilege Manager Group Policy extension for allowing elevation based on white lists of applications. Essentially the new product, called BeyondTrust Application Rights Auditor, lets you audit application usage on your Windows desktops to determine which applications will require administrative elevation to function properly. Using such a tool, you can more quickly make adjustments to your Windows system security, or use a product like Privilege Manager, to get to a point where you can remove administrator access on your systems. This is a great tool to have and very cool that they are making it available for free.
Tags:
BeyondTrust, Privilege Manager, Application Rights Auditor, Group Policy
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