Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
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...
Deploying Desired State Configuration through Group Policy
For those of you who read my blog, you'll know that I am a big fan of the Desired State Configuration feature Microsoft introduced in PowerShell v4. For more information, you can see my early walkthrough of DSC and a comparison of Group Policy vs. DSC. And while I...
SDM Software Group Policy Products Now Available to Government GSA Customers
We just wanted to make a quick announcement for our US government customers that SDM Software is now an approved GSA contractor, and all of our products are available via GSA Schedule. That includes our powerful Group Policy products such as GPO Compare, GPO Exporter...
Group Policy Auditing & Attestation 1.1
Hope everyone is having a great Summer (or Winter for you Southern Hemisphere folks)! We have been busy here at SDM, hence the lack of recent blog posts on my part. But I did want to drop a quick post to talk about our recent release of an incremental update to our...