Group Policy Blog

Just a quick note to let folks know that we’ve recently added a new Services offering to our extensive offering of Group Policy Management capabilities. So if you are looking at optimizing, consolidating or migrating your Group Policy environment, or need help with a new Group Policy design, we not only provide the products that can help you, but also the services that can do everything from…

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This coming Thursday night, May 9th, I’ll be interviewed live on the PowerScripting Podcast, hosted by PowerShell gurus Hal Rottenberg and Jonathan Walz. Tune in at 9:30PM Eastern Daylight Time to catch the live show, or catch the recorded version after the fact. It’s been 5 years since I was on this podcast so I’m looking forward to talking PowerShell, Group Policy and whatever else comes up!

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Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the TechDays conference in San Francisco. I presented on a topic other than Group Policy! And it was fun. I gave a talk entitled, “10 Tips for Success with Private Cloud”, based on my experiences working with customers on private cloud environments. I’m including the slides here below, for those who attended my talk and for those who are just curious…

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I was reading a thread on the Microsoft Group Policy TechNet Forum today. The gist of it was that someone was trying to filter a domain-linked GPO by OU membership–in other words, either prevent or allow computers in a given OU to receive a domain-linked GPO, based solely on their OU membership. One solution that was proposed was rather roundabout and got me thinking about a better way. T…

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A couple of months ago, we upgraded our partner site–http://gpoguy.com– to a new look and feel. We also converted the venerable GPTalk Listserv-based mailing list, with over 1000 subscribers, to the new GPOGUY GPTalk Forum. While this new forum doesn’t have all the advantages of a listserv in terms of delivering content to your inbox, it does have a…

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In this video, SDM Software (www.sdmsoftware.com) CTO & Founder Darren Mar-Elia shows how you can use the GPO Reporting Pak–composed of GPO Compare and Exporter, to detect changes within a…

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I’m happy to announce that SDM Software will be exhibiting for the first time at TechEd North America, this coming June 3rd through the 6th in New Orleans! It should be easy to find us as we are going to be in Booth #2222! So if you are thinking about going to TechEd or are already planning to be there, please stop by and say hi. I’ll be there and I’ll be joined in our booth by…

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Thanks to fellow Group Policy MVP  Alan Burchill for warning about this–apparently if you install Internet Explorer 10 on your Windows 7 workstation, and you also happen to manage Group Policy from that machine, the IE 10 installation removes the option to edit IE Maintenance policy from that machine completely. I even confirmed that the MMC snap-in for managing IE Maintenance policy, called…

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In a previous blog posting, I talked about the gpupdate command-line utility for forcing a GP refresh on a local system. I briefly mentioned the /sync parameter, which doesn’t actually do a GP refresh at all, but instead, just marks the next foreground GP refresh (either a machine restart or user logon) cycle as “Synchronous”. I’ve talked a lot lately about Synchronous policy processing as it…

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Just a quick note to share a great site that I stumbled upon today (not sure how I hadn’t seen it sooner). It’s a Microsoft TechNet site up on their Scripting Center, that lists a bunch of user-provided PowerShell scripts for managing Group Policy,  including a very cool script module for creating, modifying and deleting WMI filters–something that you couldn’t do before without a lot of work.

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