Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
Group Policy Automation Engine Wins an Award!
Today we here at SDM Software were notified that our Group Policy Automation Engine product won the WindowSecurity.com Readers' Choice Award -- 2nd runner up for Group Policy Management products! This goes along with this product's 2009 Windows IT Pro Editor's Choice...
Interesting Change to Group Policy in Server 2012/Windows 8
Fellow Group Policy MVP Alan Burchill brought this topic up on our GP MVP mailing list and I had to look into it. He pointed out that in the release candidate for Server 2012/Windows 8, the IE Maintenance Policy node can no longer be found within GP Editor, as shown...
The Effect of Synchronous CSEs on GroupPolicy and Windows Performance
At the recent TechEd North America talk I gave, entitled, "Best Practices for Group Policy Design with Performance and Security in Mind", one of the areas I covered was the impact of Client Side Extensions (CSEs) that only run during a synchronous GP processing cycle....
Best Practices for GroupPolicy Design Talk from TechEd
Well, TechEd was great as usual--lots of Win8 info sloshing around as well as Azure everywhere, including the recent announcement that Microsoft will be offering "Infrastructure-as-a-Service" (IaaS) instances in Azure now, ala Amazon EC2. It will be interesting to see...
SDM Software at #MSTECHED 2012!
All- If you're headed to MS TechEd next week in Orlando, SDM Software will be there in spirit. We won't have a booth there, but I'm speaking on Monday at 3pm on "Best Practices for Group Policy Design". In addition, I'll be hanging out in the booth of those great guys...
Where Are My Group Policy Settings?
One of the challenges any reasonable-sized IT shop has around Group Policy is the need to be able to find and discover all the settings that have been deployed. Something as simple as searching for one or more settings across all settings is pretty tough to do in the...
New Video on Combating GroupPolicy Sprawl Using GPO Exporter
This video describes the concept of "GPO Sprawl", how it impacts you and how you can help clean up your Group Policy environment using GPO Exporter 1.5.
Changes to GroupPolicy RSOP in Windows 8
While much is changing in Windows 8, the changes related to Group Policy are more modest. One of these modest changes is in the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) functionality, exposed through the Group Policy Results Wizard in GPMC. This wizard was always my first...
Using Group Policy to Manage the Internet Explorer Popup Blocker Allow List
A recent thread on the GPOGUY.COM GPTalk Mailing list prompted me to write about managing IE settings using Group Policy. In an article I wrote for Windows IT Pro Magazine in 2011, I talked about the various technologies in Group Policy that you can use to manage IE...
The Many Faces of Windows Configuration Management
I was reading Paul Thurrott's most recent column on the Windows IT Pro Magazine website today. The column ostensibly talked about naming of features and products in Windows 8, but at the bottom, was this interesting tidbit, "Blurring the lines in a way that's almost...