Well, Microsoft Ignite is happening next week, and SDM Software will be there in force, occupying Booth #671 on the show floor. And no conference would be complete without showing off new toys. In our case, the new toy is a shiny new product called GPO Migrator. We’ll be demonstrating the first public appearance of GPO Migrator, which will be in general availability in late October. This product fulfills a goal of ours to make migrations and consolidations of Group Policy Objects simpler. For the first time, you can grab individual settings out of GPOs and migrate them into other GPOs, with the flick of a mouse!
But perhaps one of the coolest features in GPO Migrator, is the ability to migrate GPO settings into PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) documents! We introduced a free script on GitHub a while back to allow you to mass migrate all registry policy from a given GPO into DSC documents. GPO Migrator takes it one step further, allowing you to point and select settings from not only Admin Templates, but also a variety of security settings, and migrate them to DSC documents. This powerful feature will help speed your DSC deployments and make it easier to use DSC to configure your Windows servers with the same settings you’ve deployed to Group Policy all along.
I created a short video to introduce the GPO Migrator. Have a look. Or, better yet, stop by our Ignite booth next week and see what it’s all about!
Darren
What a cool tool!
Very useful indeed.
I have seen very often situations where only one certain part or area of a GPO was required in a new GPO. If that part was something complex to create, most time that ended up in making a copy of that GPO and removing what is not required in the new GPO.
With GPO Migrator this would be much easier and more flexible….
Of course there should be no limit with regards to certain types of settings.
Else it would be only half the story.
Two questions which I have:
1. will the tool also update the AD property of my GPO to correctly reflect the used Client Side Extensions? e.g. if I migrate a GPP Printer Object to another GPO this would require an update on the global GPO properties to make sure this part is being processed at all.
2. as the tool makes changes on objects which have impact on my computers – what if there is any issue? Imagine a support case at Microsoft is raised. Would it be obvious that the GPO was not managed by Microsoft Tools? How about the warranty?