One of the members of my gptalk mailing list posted this very informative email today regarding some issues he encountered with Folder Redirection. I figured it was worthwhile to re-post it here for everyone’s benefit. Hope everyone finds it useful!
Darren
Hi guys,
Been having an interesting time with Folder re-direction on Windows 2008 r2 so thought I’d share my…
A recent thread on Mark Minasi’s forum site reminded me of a topic that comes up every once in a while–namely, how do you cleanly remove Group Policy settings from a machine that has been removed from an AD domain. The answer is to avoid the problem in the first place 
. The challenge here is that, once a machine is removed from the domain, you don’t have any control over the policy settings…
Whenever a new Windows OS ships, there’s always the inevitable period of discovery–especially for us Group Policy geeks–where we learn about all the new settings that come in GP, and how or whether we can control new OS features using Group Policy. Such was the case over the weekend when my good friend and fellow MVP Sander Berkouwer tweeted a question to me about how he could lock out the us…
Last Tuesday, I gave a talk locally in San Francisco at the Pacific IT Pros monthly meeting, on “Best Practices for Group Policy Design”. It was largely based on the talk I gave at TechEd 2012 this past June, related to how to make good decisions around your GPO deployments. For those that missed my talk last week, or just wanted to see the slides, I’m posting it here to…
A recent thread on the GPOGUY.COM GPTalk Mailing list prompted me to write about managing IE settings using Group Policy. In an article I wrote for Windows IT Pro Magazine in 2011, I talked about the various technologies in Group Policy that you can use to manage IE configuration. It’s definitely a mixed bag, with no less than 3 different policy areas that can be used, depending upon the setting…
I was reading Paul Thurrott’s most recent column on the Windows IT Pro Magazine website today. The column ostensibly talked about naming of features and products in Windows 8, but at the bottom, was this interesting tidbit,
“Blurring the lines in a way that’s almost diabolical, Microsoft recently announced that it’s introducing yet another form of PC/device management that will somewhat…
We’re here at MMS 2012 in Las Vegas this week (see a picture of our booth attached to this post!) talking to customers about their Group Policy needs. A couple of interesting themes emerged. One is kind of humorous. More often than not, when someone walked by and we asked whether they managed Group Policy, they would usually groan and say something like, “Unfortunately, yes”. That’s interesting…
Just a quick note that I finally got around to updating our freeware Group Policy Health Cmdlet to add module support for PowerShell v2. Hopefully this makes the cmdlet more discoverable for those of you using it in PowerShell v2 (probably everybody!). The module name is SDM-GPOHealth, so after running the install, just open PowerShell v2 and type:
import-module SDM-GPOHealth and you’ll b…
One of the cool things I like about our Group Policy Automation Engine product is the scenarios that it’s open up by providing what is essentially an automation portal into GPOs. One of those key scenarios is the ability to automate additions and changes to Group Policy Preferences Drive Mappings, which is used by organizations large and small to map user drives at logon, and is largely replacing…
One of the challenges of the GPMC’s reporting is that it is not easy to find GPOs that have had Deny ACEs (Access Control Entries) set on their delegation. Deny ACEs are typically used to deny a particular user, computer or group from applying a GPO. I always recommend that they’re used on an exception basis, for the very reason that they are hard to spot after the fact and can cause increased…
