Yesterday at TechEd in Barcelona, Microsoft made a slew of announcements. And buried in those announcements was the note about Group Policy Preferences. This is the name Microsoft has given to the DesktopStandard PolicyMaker extensions that they acquired last year. The good news is that these extensions are finally going to see the light of day as a free part of the OS when Server 2008 ships!!! This is HUGE because these extensions greatly add to what you can configure via Group Policy. And my understanding is that they will work on XP and above, which means that you get some of these great features without having to upgrade to Vista. In addition to adding support for new policy areas such as mapped drives, mapped printers, ini files, environment variables, shortcut distribution, local users and groups, scheduled tasks, power options, network options and IE settings, they also support much more granular filtering than you could ever get from WMI filters or security groups. This is huge because it means that there will be few things that you can’t configure on a Windows desktop using Group Policy!
Microsoft has created a whitepaper that you can download to get more detail on this new feature. This is great news!!! Cudos to the Group Policy team for making this happen!
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Great information as usual Darren! This will definitely help make the case of standing up some 2008 boxes sooner rather than later in many organizations. I can’t wait to play with it in the lab.
Thanks
Mike
The good news Mike, is that you don’t *need* Server 2008 installed to leverage this stuff, since these extensions are all client side. I suspect at that point its just a licensing issues, where you need to have at least one license for 2008 to be able to get the bits.
Windows Server 2008 RC 1 ready
Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 Release Candidate 1 publicly today, along with Release Candidate