If you’ve followed my blog postings and articles recently, you know that I’ve been speaking and writing on decisions that you can make in your Group Policy design that impact GP processing performance, and often, perceived desktop performance by the end user. Group Policy has some subtle and not-so-subtle features–such as Client Side Extensions that force synchronous processing, or GP Preferences Item-Level Targeting that can take a while to complete–that can often have a significant impact over GP processing performance. That often translates into slower boot and logon times for users, which no one wants to see. In fact, someone asked me recently the age old question, “How many GPOs is too many?” and my answer was that it really depends more upon what you’re doing in those GPOs than how many you have.
To that end, I’m really excited about a new version of our GPO Exporter product that is about to be released. Version 2.0, which will be out before year’s end for both Windows 7 and Windows 8, includes a new set of canned reports that will be FREE to use for anyone who downloads the demo version. As shown in the screenshot below, these “Slow Boot/Slow Logon Reports” provide unique insight into GPO design decisions that can have an impact on desktop processing performance.
GPO Exporter 2.0 Slow Boot/Slow Logon Reports
These reports are designed to scan your whole GPO environment, and point out GPOs that contain setting areas or settings that have an impact on your desktops performance. And, they will be free for anyone to use who downloads the demo version!
We hope you get good use out of these reports, and of course also find value in the other features within GPO Exporter, such as Duplicate and Conflicting Settings reports as well as new capabilities for analyzing GPO conflicts or redundancies down to the OU level. Look for the release of 2.0 on our website soon! I’ll be writing up a a blog post as soon as it’s available.
Darren