Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
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...
GPO Compare Demonstration
In this video, Darren Mar-Elia, SDM Software's CTO and Founder, demonstrates the SDM Software GPO Compare product, a tool for being able to perform actions such as comparing group policy objects across your Windows enterprise network and creating reports about GPOs....
Understanding the Group Policy GPUpdate Command
Anyone that manages Group Policy probably knows about the gpupdate.exe utility that ships with Windows. GPUpdate's job in life is to refresh Group Policy manually, rather than relying on Windows to do it on it's own schedule. This can be a useful troubleshooting tool...
WMI Filter Test Utility Updated to Include timings
Just a quick note before the weekend starts to let folks know I updated the GPOGUY.COM WMI Filter Test Utility to include timing information (see below). Specifically, this lets you see how long a given WMI filter took to evaluate on the target system, so you can see...
Re-ordering Group Policy Client Side Extensions
Recently a fellow Group Policy MVP asked about whether it was possible to control the order of Client-Side Extension (CSE) processing in Group Policy. The CSEs are the DLLs that do the real work of policy processing in GP. They reside on all Windows client machines...
Retrieving GPO Links with PowerShell
Sometimes I'm reminded that, even though Microsoft has been shipping their Group Policy PowerShell module for a while now, it is missing some key functionality. Fortunately, it took someone else asking me a question about how they could script something in PowerShell...