Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
New Version of SDM Software GPO Compare Ships!
Just wanted to drop a quick note to let folks know that we just shipped version 2.6 of GPO Compare! This is an incremental update but it includes some key new features, including support in our GPO Compare PowerShell cmdlet for comparing GPO Exporter snapshots. This...
Cleaning Group Policy When Removing a Machine from the Domain
A recent thread on Mark Minasi's forum site reminded me of a topic that comes up every once in a while--namely, how do you cleanly remove Group Policy settings from a machine that has been removed from an AD domain. The answer is to avoid the problem in the first...
Vote for SDM Software’s Group Policy Products!
Windows IT Pro Magazine is holding their annual Community Choice Awards for IT products. SDM Software has three products nominated this year, as follows: Best Active Directory & Group Policy Product SDM Software GPO Reporting Pak SDM Software Group Policy...
Windows 8 Group Policy Settings: Blocking Connected Accounts
Whenever a new Windows OS ships, there's always the inevitable period of discovery--especially for us Group Policy geeks--where we learn about all the new settings that come in GP, and how or whether we can control new OS features using Group Policy. Such was the case...
Managing Group Policy in a Windows 8 World
Now that Windows 8 is out (or almost out), the inevitable questions will arise about introducing it into your Group Policy Management world. As with previous versions of Windows, the approach with Windows 8 (and Server 2012) will be similar. Since Windows 8 and Server...
Best Practices for Group Policy Design Talk — Slides Posted
Last Tuesday, I gave a talk locally in San Francisco at the Pacific IT Pros monthly meeting, on "Best Practices for Group Policy Design". It was largely based on the talk I gave at TechEd 2012 this past June, related to how to make good decisions around your GPO...
GPO Exporter 1.6 Ships!
It's often the case in software that there's more stuff that you want to do in a product than you have time for in a given release. That was the case with our recent release of GPO Exporter -- 1.6. There were a number of things that didn't make it into 1.5...
Detecting Group Policy Settings Drift Using GPO Exporter [VIDEO]
This week we'll be releasing an minor update to our GPO Exporter product. One of the cool things that we're adding to this release is the ability to generate GPO settings snapshots using PowerShell. The GUI version of the product already includes the ability to export...
The Return of Group Policy Health Reporter!
Way back in 2006 when I started SDM Software as THE Group Policy solutions company, our first product release was a little GUI utility called GP Health Reporter. We stopped selling it a few years back but I decided to bring it back as freeware, and am happy to...
Microsoft Guidance on IE Maintenance GroupPolicy Removal in Windows 8
As I blogged a few days back, Microsoft has deprecated (or removed) IE Maintenance Policy in Windows 8/Server 2012. And while I think this is a generally good thing, some folks may be wondering how they're going to configure IE going forward. Well, Microsoft has...