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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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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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In recent days, I’ve become aware of a couple of interesting “features” around Group Policy in Windows 8. Both were reported by other users and I confirmed their behavior on my own. The first issue, which I would categorize as a bug, is the following.

As you probably know, in the version of GPMC that ships with Windows 8/2012, there were some improvements made to the RSoP (Group Policy…

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Don’t forget to register for our upcoming Group Policy design webinar this Wednesday, January 30th, at 9am Pacific Time (GMT-8). Details at the link below, but here is a quick synopsis:

Title

Optimizing Group Policy Design and Performance with SDM Software
Description
In this Webinar, Group Policy MVP Derek Melber and MVP and CTO & Founder of SDM Software, Darren Mar-Elia will provid…

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I’m happy to announce that on January 30th at 9am Pacific Time (GMT-8), SDM Software will be presenting a webinar entitled, “Optimizing Group Policy Design and Performance with SDM Software”. In this webinar, fellow Group Policy MVP Derek Melber and myself will be talking about best practices for Group Policy design to ensure good desktop performance and security. In this webinar, Derek w…

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Just a quick note to let folks know that the interview I gave with TechNet Radio about the changes for Group Policy in Server 2012/Windows 8 is up now at:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/TechNet+Radio/TechNet-Radio-STB-News-Bytes-Whats-New-for-Group-Policy-in-Windows-Server-2012

In the interview, I talk to Microsoft Director Karen Forster about all manner of Group Policy related topics,…

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Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I am hard pressed to understand how another year has come and gone. Here at SDM, we have been non-stop busy delivering awesome new Group Policy Management Tools to you, our customers. 2012 marked another banner year for us, where we substantially increased both our customer base and revenues over the previous year, including several new high-prof…

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I was trolling around GP Editor in Windows 8 and found a set of Administrative Template settings that I had not seen before. Interestingly, those setting did indeed exist in Windows 7 (and probably Vista) so it was just me missing them. Prior to those OS releases, if you want to configure Windows Event Logs for things like maximum log size or retention behavior, you traditionally did that from…

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote this post on the MSDN site, reviewing some of the new Group Policy features in Windows 8/Server 2012. One of those features was a new PowerShell cmdlet in the Group Policy PowerShell module called invoke-gpupdate. This cmdlet, as the name implies, allows you to do a GPUpdate against remote target machines. This cmdlet is similar to another new feature in…

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I saw a thread on the Microsoft TechNet forums yesterday that prompted me to write a quick post about this behavior change for the Group Policy client service in Windows 8.  In order to live in a world of new Windows 8 devices that use less power or may be on all the time (e.g. Microsoft Surface or similar tablets) Windows 8 in general has been optimized to use less resources, especially when…

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