Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
GPO Compare 2.5 (New) Demo | Group Policy Management [Video]
Today we released an updated version of our widely used GPO Compare product. The 2.5 release brings some cool new features and improvements over 2.0, including: Ability to now compare up to 4 GPOs or GPO backups, for comparing GPOs or backups against a baseline GPO...
Have a Group Policy New Year from SDM Software!!
Well, 2011 is almost over, and it's a been a great year for SDM Software. We achieved record revenue results this year--smashing last year's total by over 300%-- and have over 150 customers to thank for our continued success. This is in addition to the 100os of folks...
Digging Into Group Policy WMI Filters and Managing them through PowerShell
WMI Filters have been available as a mechanism for filtering the effects of Group Policy Objects (GPOs) since Server 2003 & XP shipped. They are a valuable tool in your Group Policy Management arsenal. As the name implies, WMI filters allow you to filter the...
Comparing GPOs to a Baseline Using GPO Compare
One of the cool things about our GPO Compare product is it's support for PowerShell. The product ships with a PowerShell cmdlet called Compare-SDMGPO that lets you compare live and backed-up GPOs--just like the GUI. We can use this capability to automate the...
The Dichotomy of the “Cloud”
I spent the last two days at Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, sitting in on sessions and talking to vendors that produce solutions in this space. As a backdrop to this, I've spent a fair bit of time over the past several months working with customers who are evaluating...
Leveraging Group Policy Preferences Item-Level Targeting from “Downlevel” Group Policy
Recently I've had some conversations with folks that related to their irritation that "legacy" Group Policy settings such as Admin. Templates, Security Settings, Software Installation, etc. could not benefit from the fine-grained "Item-Level-Targeting" (ILT) feature...
Good Guide to Group Policy ADMX Files Provided by Microsoft
Someone at Microsoft was kind enough to put together a nice list of all the various ADMX files that Microsoft product groups provide for extending Administrative Templates within Group Policy. Bravo for him doing this work:...
SDM GPMC Cmdlets Updated to Support PowerShell v.2
When we created our GPMC PowerShell cmdlets in 2008, they made it easy to get at GPMC functionality within PowerShell v1. When Microsoft shipped Windows 7/2008-R2, they also provided their own set of GPMC-related cmdlets within their GroupPolicy module. At the time I...
Group Policy: Policy vs. Preferences — what does it all mean?
I recently had a good conversation with a fellow Group Policy MVP about the difference between policies and preferences (i.e. Group Policy Preferences). He asserted that with preferences, the "user can work around the settings (generally.)". This got me thinking about...
GPO Exporter Demonstration [Video]
In this video, Darren Mar-Elia, SDM Software's CTO and Founder, demonstrates the SDM Software GPO Exporter product, a tool that quickly and easily document your Group Policy Environment. Whether you are trying to discover an existing environment, find overlapping or...