Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
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...
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...