Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
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...
Find all Registry Settings Managed in a GPO
Group Policy Objects (GPOs) can contain many different kinds of settings. Much of that data is simple registry data. Finding registry settings in GPOs and handling them is not the simplest of tasks and requires some PowerShell. Microsoft has provided some cmdlets for...
Move-Printer – creating the advanced function
Why a PowerShell Advanced Function This is a bit of a stream of conscious follow-up to a previous post related to managing Deployed Printers with the Group Policy Automation Engine. I decided today, while working with someone, that porting this to an Advanced Function...
Group Policy Automation Engine – Deployed Printers
The SDM Group Policy Automation Engine provides a PowerShell interface for getting and setting configuration in Group Policy Objects (GPOs). We utilize a single cmdlet called Get-SDMGPObject. This single cmdlet provides all the secret sauce that makes the magic...
The [wmisearcher] Type Accelerator
Happy New Year everyone! 2016 is going to completely ROCK! I love the feeling of optimism with all new beginnings, and the beginning of the year always has me take time to think about what was great about the previous year and what is going to be great about the next!...
It’s 2016– And the future of Group Policy Is …?
For my first post of the new year, I thought I'd go big and talk about some existential questions facing Windows configuration management. First, whither Group Policy? Second, how do we think about all this here at SDM Software--as we consider ourselves more than just...
Group Policy to Desired State Configuration
Group Policy has been a bit of a comfort for many of us for the past 15 years. It is a technology that is full of promise and capability. It is sufficiently complex, and incredibly powerful. As PowerShell has evolved to embrace configuration with Desired State...
What’s New in Group Policy in Windows 10?
With each new version of Windows, I try to write up something to summarize what's new in Group Policy from the last version. As those of you who follow me know, I've noted that the list of "What's Changed" in Group Policy has grown shorter and shorter with each...