Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
Auditing Group Policy Security Settings with Group Policy Compliance Manager
You'll recall a couple of blog posts ago, I announced that we had shipped our Group Policy Compliance Manager (GPCM) product, which allows you to report on what Group Policy is doing on all your end nodes that process policy. One of the key use cases for...
Group Policy Loopback Everywhere?
Just the other day I was talking to a customer about Group Policy loopback. If you'll recall, loopback is that feature in Group Policy processing that allows you to override a user's *normal* user policy settings when they log into specific machines--such as kiosks or...
Group Policy Compliance Manager has arrived!
I started SDM Software back in 2006 with the goal to solve some of the thornier problems of managing Group Policy in enterprise environments. Years of on-the-job experience had shown me the challenges of the "in-the-box" solutions when it came to delivering a reliable...
Group Policy Best Practices Play-by-Play at Pluralsight
All- Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that I recently worked with the great folks over at Pluralsight to record a Group Policy Best Practices "Play-by-Play"-- a one-on-one discussion with Pluralsight VP Gary Eimerman to talk about the challenges and best...
Controlling Windows Search in Windows 10 (and Windows 8)
Recently I've been testing Windows 10 Preview Enterprise. It's always good to see how new features in new versions of Windows will behave in a typical enterprise environment. One feature that carries forward from Windows 8.x into Windows 10 is the Start Menu/Screen...
PowerShell and WMI Webinar This Friday!
Hi Folks- Just wanted to drop a quite note to let everyone know that myself (Darren Mar-Elia) and Kevin Sullivan (@kevsully67), Director of Sales Engineering at SpecOps Software are doing a webinar on PowerShell and WMI. If you've always wanted to learn about WMI and...
Optimizing Group Policy WMI Filters
If you live in a Group Policy world that heavily leverages WMI filters, then this tip is for you. Fellow Group Policy MVP Martin Binder wrote up a nice post about how you can optimize WMI filter queries (WQL queries) to improve their processing performance. This...
Are We Moving Towards a “Post-AD” World?
Over the past year, I've had occasion to work with some large enterprises that are pushing the envelope in terms of what the next generation of client computing will look like. In the process of this work, I've come to recognize what I think will be an inevitable...
Searching Group Policy Settings
It seems like a logical thing to be able to do--you have a bunch of GPOs and you want to search for settings across them. In fact, it turns out to be a fair bit of work with native tools. It's true that Microsoft has provided, for a while now, an Azure-based...
Folder Redirection–To the Cloud (Storage)!
There's no question that traditional file services (e.g. Windows file servers, NAS filers, etc.) are slowly being usurped in the enterprise, by cloud storage vendors such as Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox and Citrix Sharefile. And while some...