Thanks to a thread on our GPOGUY.COM GPTalk Mailing list, I decided it was time to crack open our GPMC PowerShell module and make a couple of updates. The most significant of these is two new cmdlets:
Get-SDMGPOOwner
Set-SDMGPOOwner
As the name implies, these two cmdlets let you retrieve and set the owner id (AD user or group) on a GPO. This is not something that is exposed in either t…
Now that Windows 8 is out (or almost out), the inevitable questions will arise about introducing it into your Group Policy Management world. As with previous versions of Windows, the approach with Windows 8 (and Server 2012) will be similar. Since Windows 8 and Server 2012 will be introducing more new settings into Group Policy, you’ll need to use the GPMC and GP Editor versions that come wit…
While much is changing in Windows 8, the changes related to Group Policy are more modest. One of these modest changes is in the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) functionality, exposed through the Group Policy Results Wizard in GPMC. This wizard was always my first “go-to” tool when trying to troubleshoot GP Processing problems, and they’ve made it more useful in Windows 8.
The first thing you’…
Sometimes I’m reminded that, even though Microsoft has been shipping their Group Policy PowerShell module for a while now, it is missing some key functionality. Fortunately, it took someone else asking me a question about how they could script something in PowerShell to realize that our SDM GPMC cmdlets, which have been around since about 2008, have a pretty good set of functionality even in t…
Sometimes you want to know how many GPOs you have in a domain. Powershell provides a way to do this quickly and easily. Earlier today I tweeted about the way to do this in Windows 7 or Server 2008-R2, using the Microsoft-provided “GroupPolicy” PowerShell Module. Its as simple as:
(Get-GPO -All).Count
However, if you are not yet on these newer OS versions, you can still get this information from…
Thanks to reader Ryan Steele for bringing my attention to the fact that MS has released a hotfix to resolve the GPMC reporting bug that was introduced when Win7 and Server 2008, R2 shipped. I had documented this bug in an earlier blog post. Ryan let me know that MS finally issued a hotfix for this, described at…
GPO Backups and Windows version sensitivity
I had a question recently that I thought was worth blogging. The question was, “if I create a GPO using Windows 7, Server 2008 or similar newer platform”, then backup that GPO using XP or Server 2003, will it back up everything?”. The answer, not surprisingly, is “it depends”. GPMC Backup only backs up the “policy areas” that it knows about. For example, if I set some policy settings within…
Just a quick shout-out to let folks know that I posted an update to our SDM Software GPMC Cmdlets on our freeware page. This is version 1.3 and primarily just fixes some bugs including an issue when you tried to get, add or remove site-based GPO links. Enjoy! Tags:Group Policy, GPMC, Powershell, SDM…
I had a question come up today about a use case for our GPMC cmdlets and figured it was worth sharing for other’s benefit. Here’s the scenario. I have a GPO who’s name I know. I want to find all the places that its linked and then I want disable all the links for that GPO. And I want to use PowerShell to do it because, well, I can!So here we go. The first thing we need to do is searc…
