Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
Welcome Walt Ramick
SDM Software is extremely excited to have Walt Ramick join our team leading both our tactical and strategic sales efforts. Walt has been involved with organizations selling enterprise software and services for over a decade and brings a wealth of knowledge around the...
Windows Nano Server–The “Group Policy-less Future?”
It's been about a year since Microsoft first announced plans to deliver Nano Server--a new SKU of Windows Server that is essentially a highly stripped down version of the OS, optimized for cloud/data center environments and container/micro-service workloads. What does...
Group Policy Security Compliance with PowerShell
Last year we shipped the Group Policy Compliance Manager (GPCM) product--our enterprise compliance reporting solution for Group Policy. Today we are releasing a new PowerShell module to go along with GPCM. This module allows for some cool capabilities for searching,...
GP Automation – Folder Options/Open With
OK, so this is not a 'new' story but it is an interesting one. Since the first script kitties were writing viruses that did nefarious things we had ways to ensure we could limit their impact. Redirecting .vbs to notepad was super common. I saw a tweet today from one...
DevOps and the Cross Platform Windows Group Policy SDK
Group Policy's Cross Platform History It was the early 2000s. I was at Quest Software--serving as CTO for the Windows management business. A lot of my job in those days involved looking at technologies to acquire. Even at that time, I had been a Group Policy geek for...
Group Policy Automation and Dell Authentication Services
As you may have heard last week, or seen in our newsletter, or read graffiti'd all over the New York subway system, our Group Policy Automation Engine (GPAE) has added support to help organizations manage their Unix systems with Group Policy! OK, maybe that is a...
PowerShell and DevOps Summit Global Summit 2016 – my week at a glance
What a great week! I have been wanting to attend this summit for years and it just never got on my short priority list. This year was different and to be honest, it took DSC and DevOps to get me there. I love PowerShell, have been a fan for a very long time. Since my...
Darren’s 9 Group Policy Principles
Darren Mar-Elia and I spent some time this week with a group of consultants and service providers. These folks come from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. Our goal was to talk about Group Policy, some best practices, and share some of our experiences of a...
Auditing Security Access Changes on Critical Windows Servers
Here's the scenario: You've got some Windows servers that contain critical customer data--it might be customer records, or PCI (Payment Card Industry) data, or just a critical system on your network. You rightly use Group Policy Restricted Groups policy or similar,...
GPO Reporting Pak – Find-DupGPSettings
Following a bit of a theme here. I did some exploring on scenarios related to using the GPO Reporting Pak PowerShell cmdlets to automate some GP troubleshooting. This video talks about searching through the output of your report inside the PowerShell pipeline. This...