Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
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...
Migrating from IE Maintenance Home Page Policy Using PowerShell
There's no doubt that Microsoft's dropping support of IE Maintenance Policy for systems running IE 10 and above has been a blessing and a curse. As I've observed, the blog postings I've done on this site related to this issue continue to have the highest view counts....
The New GPOGUY.COM Portal Coming to SDMSoftware.com
Hi Folks If you're a fan of my gpoguy.com web site, which I started many years ago as a resource for all things Group Policy, you'll be interested in this latest news. In order to provide a single spot where you can get great information on Group Policy, free tools...
GPO Troubleshooting FAQ
(reproduced from my original posting on Mark Minasi’s Forum, with some embellishments)
This is really more of a checklist of the kinds of things that typically go wrong in GPO processing, and how you can check for them.
Get Your Group Policy Questions Answered by the “GPOGUY”!
Hi folks- Just wanted to drop a quick note to let you all know that we (SDM Software) are putting on a Group Policy Q&A Free-for-All on March 12th, at 9am US Pacific Time (UTC-8). If you've got Group Policy questions--come to the webinar and I'll take one at a...
Circumventing IE Proxy Policy with…Charms!
An astute reader of this blog brought an interesting scenario to my attention, and I spent some time confirming it. For those of you running Windows 8 (or 8.1) there's a neat "feature" that allows your users to circumvent controls you put in place for controlling...
Group Policy Cleanup and GPO Exporter
Group Policy Cleanup and optimization is top-of-mind for many of our customers. One of the key tools for helping customers achieve optimized GPO environments, SDM Software's GPO Exporter product, just got an update recently. One of the small improvements we added was...
Override the Group Policy ADMX Central Store
Ever since Microsoft introduced the Central Store -- a folder in SYSVOL where you can centrally keep all of your ADMX and ADML template files for Group Policy management -- you've had to make all or nothing decisions about which ADMX files you could use for GP editing...
Locating Those Nasty Passwords in Group Policy Preferences Using PowerShell
If you haven't already seen it, it's now been widely documented that the feature within GP Preferences Group Policy that allows you to store passwords within a GPO for a variety of uses, is essentially not secure. If you haven't read one of these posts, please do and...
Understanding Group Policy Change Auditing
There's no doubt that the built-in security auditing in Windows is thorough--sometimes too thorough, as anyone who has tried to manage auditing logs in large AD environments knows. But when it comes to auditing Group Policy changes, the native auditing can be lacking....