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