I’m proud to announce that today we released GPO Exporter 1.5. This new release represents a huge step up in the arsenal of tools for analyzing and optimizing Group Policy deployments. I can’t tell you how many IT folks come to me and ask how they can streamline and reduce the number of GPOs they have deployed. But the problem is hard, with the sheer number of settings deployed in any reasonable sized environment running into the 1000s (and some of our customers have 100s of thousands of settings spread across 1000s of GPOs!). So there needs to be a way to reduce that dataset to a manageable and actionable subset. Enter GPO Exporter. GPO Exporter 1.5 builds on the 1.0 release with more features that help you directly find ways to optimize your Group Policy deployments. Just like in 1.0, 1,5 allows you to ask questions like,
“Show me all the Restricted Groups settings across all my GPOs”
“Filter just the settings across all my GPOs that contain a particular AD group name”
“Search for all occurences of the word ‘password’ in my GPOs”
But what we’ve added in 1.5 is a lot of exciting stuff, including the following:
- Filter export results and snapshot views to display only those settings that contain your keyword
- View a variety of pre-defined reports for precision reporting with the Report Portal. Reports include Unlinked GPOs, GPO by Policy Area, Duplicate/Conflicting Settings, Empty/Unlinked GPOs and more.
- Easily save and import Exporter Snapshots for an organized view into point-in-time exports
- Perform exports across multiple domains in a forest, allowing a full reporting of settings across multiple domains
- Export specific policy areas faster and more accurately
I’m most excited about the Report Portal, which provides a set of pre-defined reports that give you unprecedented visibility into your GP environment. We have reports that tell you where all the unlinked and empty GPOs are, and reports that show you which GPO implement which policy areas, but the two reports I’m most excited about are the Duplicate and Conflicting Settings reports (see an example below).
Group Policy Conflicting Settings Report
In the image above, the conflicting settings report analyzes all your GPOs in your domain and reports any settings that are in conflict and where they are linked. In environments with 100s or 1000s of settings, this is hugely beneficial because it gets you quickly to some actionable steps where you can start reducing those conflicts. The same holds true for the duplicate settings report, which shows settings that are set identically across multiple GPOs–a common occurence in larger environments that causes undue GP processing and, ultimately, slower desktop performance.
So, if GPO reporting, consolidation or, ultimately, optimization, are your goal, have a look at GPO Exporter 1.5–visit our website and click on the Trial link to give it a spin!
Thanks,
Darren