by Darren Mar-Elia | Jan 15, 2026 | Group Policy, Group Policy Management, Group Policy Tools
Anyone who manages Group Policy (GP) knows about the gpupdate.exe utility that ships with Windows. GPUpdate’s job is to refresh Group Policy manually, rather than relying on Windows to do it on its own schedule. Specifically, it can be used to force the system to ask...
by Kevin Sullivan | Jan 12, 2026 | Cloud, General, Group Policy, Group Policy Design, Tips & Tricks, Windows Intune
As organizations move from traditional on-premises Group Policy to cloud-based device management with Microsoft Intune, a common challenge emerges: what to do with existing custom ADMX files. These files often represent years of investment in policy enforcement for...
by Darren Mar-Elia | Dec 15, 2025 | Group Policy, Group Policy Management, Tips & Tricks
For more than two decades, administrators have relied on Group Policy to centrally manage and configure settings across users and computers within their domains. However, this powerful tool wouldn’t be of much use without the ADMX file, which defines and structures...
by Darren Mar-Elia | Aug 8, 2016 | GP Troubleshooting, Group Policy, Group Policy Blog, Group Policy Reporting, PowerShell, sdm software
One of the many scenarios that organizations contend with is impact analysis. For SDM Software this is about configuration and most importantly security configuration. For example, what happens if you go into Active Directory Users and Computers and move Server1 from...
by Darren Mar-Elia | Dec 8, 2015 | Desired State Configuration, GP Troubleshooting, Group Policy, Group Policy Blog, Group Policy Management, Group Policy Tools, PowerShell, registry policy
Group Policy has been a bit of a comfort for many of us for the past 15 years. It is a technology that is full of promise and capability. It is sufficiently complex, and incredibly powerful. As PowerShell has evolved to embrace configuration with Desired State...
by Darren Mar-Elia | Nov 10, 2015 | General Stuff, Group Policy, Group Policy Automation, PowerShell
Just a quick tip. I found this a bit too cool not to share. I was working in the PowerShell ISE building up a demo script for our Group Policy Automation Engine. If you are not familiar with it you should be! Anyway, as I built it up I used some variable names that...
