Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
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...
Group Policy Attestation Explained
One of the cool features available in our Group Policy Auditing & Attestation (GPAA) product is the ability to perform attestation on Group Policy Objects (GPOs). In the video below, I spend some time discussing what GPO attestation is all about--the ability to...
Delegate Group Policy Update in Windows 8.x
When Microsoft shipped Windows 8 & Windows Server 2012, they added a new feature in GPMC, that allows you to perform remote Group Policy Updates on OUs of computers. I covered this feature in my previous roundup of Windows 8.1 Group Policy features. This feature...
Finding Group Policy Differences Between OUs
A frequent scenario that we come across here at SDM Software, are customers looking for help in discovering Group Policy differences between OUs. Namely, they may have a Marketing OU and a Sales OU that have GPOs linked to them, and they'd like to know how those are...
Group Policy Preferences Passwords Bite the Dust!
For those of you following this issue, which I blogged about previously, you'll know that several areas within Group Policy Preferences allowed for defining of passwords that were stored with the GPO settings storage in SYSVOL. These passwords were stored using an...
Using Group Policy & PowerShell to Mitigate Recent Internet Explorer Vulnerability
Over this last weekend, Microsoft published warnings of yet another zero-day "memory corruption" Internet Explorer vulnerability to all versions of the venerable browser . Since there is no current patch for this yet, IT administrators are left to mitigate against it...
Ready to Share your Feedback on Group Policy?
Love it or hate it, Group Policy has been a fixture of Windows configuration management for over a decade. As someone who has been intimately involved in both its past and its future, I have had the same mixed relationship with both Group Policy and Microsoft. Here at...
Anything New in Group Policy for Windows 8.1 Update One?
Last week, Microsoft shipped to MSDN subscribers, the bits for the first update to Windows 8.1. Regular users of 8.1 will get the update starting today, through Windows Update. A natural question would be, did Microsoft make any outwardly visible improvements or...