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