Part II of our GPO Impact Analysis. For the purpose of this post the primary capability of Export-SDMGPSettings is to grab a ‘snapshot’ of all of the settings managed in a set of GPOs.
Export-SDMGPSettings is one of the core cmdlets that make up the PowerShell part of the GPO Reporting Pak (GPRP). The syntax is very straight forward and the engineers at SDM did a great job with useful help content.
If you recall from Part I we ask the end user for the name of the OU to analyze. The results of Part I is a list of the GPOs that affect a certain OU. We will pass that information into Export-SDMGPsettings and create a saved snapshot.
A snapshot is picture of all of the settings managed within 1 or more GPOs. With this snapshot you can do some interesting analysis such as show duplicate settings, conflicting settings and much more. The video explores some of those options. Our scenario here is going to ultimately compare two different snapshots of settings impact on different OUs.
The only information necessary is going to be a snapshot path (path to store the file) and a snapshot comment (easy to find and quickly understand its purpose).
Check out this video as we explore Export-SDMGPSettings.