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A couple of weeks ago at Microsoft’s TechEd North America conference, we (SDM Software) exhibited at the Tech Expo there, showing off both our existing products, like GPO Exporter and GPO Compare, as well as our brand-new offering: Group Policy Auditing and Attestation (GPAA). I’m particularly proud of GPAA, because it brings together three highly valuable Group Policy change management functions: Group Policy change auditing, GPO rollback and GPO attestation– into one powerful new product. I’ll be blogging more about the whys and hows of GPO attestation soon, but for now, let me give you a quick overview of that particular feature. With GPO attestation in GPAA, you can now assign “ownership” to critical GPOs within your environment. The product takes care of notifying owners on a period that you specify, that their GPOs are still valid in the environment (it even sends them a GPO settings report). It allows them to accept or reject the attestation and if they reject it, they can give a reason for the rejection. This allows you to avoid the dreaded “GPO bloat” that many IT shops suffer from, as a result of GPOs being created haphazardly over time–essentially by making people responsible for the continued value of a given GPO! In addition, it addresses many organization’s need for having attestation for critical IT resources, from an audit and compliance perspective. It’s a cool feature and one that I’m proud we were able to include!

For more information about the product, check out this demo video we just posted on YouTube: