Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The "GPOGUY")
From Group Policy to Intune: Why It Feels More Complex
Group Policy (GP) has served the needs of Active Directory-based enterprises for more than 25 years. For so many admins, GP is familiar, predictable, and mature. However, as organizations embrace cloud computing and move away from traditional on-premises...
How To Eliminate Backup and Restore Gap in Intune
Microsoft Intune has become a leading endpoint-management platform, with roughly 50,000 organizations using it today. Intune is growing fast, but it's being adopted in environments that still expect the operational safety nets they had with on-prem...
Group Policy: Policy vs. Preferences — What Does It All Mean?
Once you understand Group Policy storage and structure, the next step is to learn the distinction between Group Policy and Group Policy Preferences (GPP). At a high level, both mechanisms deliver configuration to Windows, but they operate very differently because of...
What Does Group Policy Do When It Can’t Contact a DC?
The title of this blog says it all. What happens to Group Policy processing when a client machine is off the network and can't contact its domain controllers (DCs)? When trying to find the answer, you face even more follow-up questions: Does the applied...
Practical Tips for Ensuring Group Policy and Intune Design
Group Policy is a powerful administrative tool that enables centralized enforcement and standardization of settings across your environment. With so many capabilities at your disposal, it begs the question: Is it better to use functional, modular GPOs or...
Configuring Event Logs with Group Policy and Intune
Years ago, if you wanted to configure Windows Event Logs for things like maximum log size or retention behavior, you typically did that in Security Settings. Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft added a new Administrative Template that added new...
What Is the Registry Policy Archive File and How It Can Be Abused
How many of you remember that, long before GP Preferences was acquired by Microsoft, they used to refer to any Administrative Template settings that did not set values in the 4 magic registry keys as…wait for it…preferences? That’s right, there were...
How to Deploy Group Policy Preferences through Microsoft Intune?
82% of our customers are operating in a hybrid world for their configuration governance tasks, balancing between premises and one or multiple clouds. Group Policy has been around for 26 years, and still serves many customers well, especially for Windows...
Demystifying Loopback Processing in Group Policy
I still stumble across questions about Group Policy Loopback Processing on Reddit and other platforms. It confounds a lot of folks because what it does is a bit complex. In this blog, I am going to try to break it down so it is easy to digest. What is...
Evaluating OU Membership Using WMI Filters
I was reminded of a thread I read a while back where someone was trying to filter a domain-linked GPO by OU membership. The objective was to allow or block computers in a specific OU from receiving a domain-linked GPO purely by evaluating the OU to which...