If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know that about a year ago, I described a PowerShell script I wrote that migrates Group Policy Administrative Template settings to PowerShell Desired State Configuration Documents. I finally got around to updating this script, with help from our VP of Product Management–Kevin Sullivan. You can find the updated script on github. The key improvements I made were to incorporate Kevin’s advanced function syntax to make the script more PowerShell-friendly. In addition, as I was testing some additional scenarios, I found a bunch of issues around parsing certain kinds of GP settings, so I was able to fix those as well.
One thing that I didn’t talk about when I first published this script, was that in addition to the ability to migrate Administrative Template settings from a given existing GPO into a DSC document, the script can also migrate Windows Firewall with Advanced Security, Software Restriction Policy and AppLocker policy. Why? Because all of these additional policy areas store their settings in the same registry.pol file that Administrative Templates does. Given that my script is essentially parsing registry.pol, you get all of those additional setting areas for free! Cool.
So, I went ahead and did a quick video of this. Check it out and let me know if you have questions–or feel free to download and test the script–since it’s on git, you can use it and modify it to your heart’s content, and if you have cool updates, take a pull request and I’ll check it out.
Darren