Today we released an updated version of our widely used GPO Compare product. The 2.5 release brings some cool new features and improvements over 2.0, including:
- Ability to now compare up to 4 GPOs or GPO backups, for comparing GPOs or backups against a baseline GPO
- Support for comparing GPO Exporter Snapshots, to quickly and easily find what settings have changed within a GPO environment
- Support for showing settings that are same as well as different
- Added support in the PowerShell GPO Compare cmdlet for up to 4 GPOs and/or backups
- Improved menu navigation and grid view makes comparing settings easier.
- Customizable Report titles for generating PDF or Excel-based comparison reports
- New Comparison Options feature lets you customize delimiters, GPO metadata, Domain Controllers used for reporting and custom ADMX template paths
- Ability to customize colors used to display differences
Check out more information in the video demo within this post, or, visit http://sdmsoftware.com/products/group-policy-compare/ to register for a trial!
Darren
Video Transcription:
GPO Compare 2.5 (New) Demo | Group Policy Management
Darren Mar-Elia: Hello. This is Darren Mar-Elia, CTO and Founder of SDM Software and the gpoguy.com website. SDM Software is the leader in solutions for group policy management. Today, I’m gonna walk you through a quick demo of our powerful new version of GPO Compare version 2.5. GPO Compare 2.5 adds a ton of great new features to make it quick and easy to find differences in group policy objects. First and foremost, we now support comparison of up to four live GPOs or GPO backups. In addition, you can now see the settings [inaudible 00:35] the same across GPOs in addition to differences. We also support the ability to compare snapshots from our GPO Exporter product and there are a bunch of other usability improvements that I think you’re gonna like, so without further ado let’s get into the demo.
The first thing you’re gonna notice if you’ve used previous versions of GPO Compare is that the look and feel is completely different. Let’s go ahead and start a new comparison. I’ll bring up the compare wizard and right now you see that I have the ability to add up to four new GPOs. I can compare live GPOs, GPO backups, or GPO exporter snapshots. Let’s go ahead and compare some live GPOs. I’m gonna pick group policy objects that are Microsoft template objects within the group policy environment.
I’m gonna go ahead and run the comparison. And what you see now is that all four GPOs are represented within the grid view and differences are shown against the baseline which is the first GPO that I chose in this environment. So, all differences are shown including settings that are different or missing, settings that exist in GPOs but that are not in the baseline. And if I switch views, I can now show all settings that are the same within particular GPOs against the baseline. So, what this new feature provides is the ability to see not only differences but settings that are the same. I can also again create comparison reports that are now customizable in terms of the title. So I can go ahead and create a title and printout a comparison report. I can save that report to either Excel or PDF as well. I can customize the color schemes.
So if wish to choose different colors for different kinds of differences or different kinds of settings that are the same, I can go ahead and do that and that color change takes effect right away. I can also set comparison options, which includes the ability to include metadata within the comparison. Metadata is things like GPO permissions and security and links. I can do different delimiters for reporting out the data. If I use custom ADM or ADMX paths for reporting, I can enter those here and I can also control which domain controllers used to generate the reports.
And as in the previous version, I can do quick and easy keyword searches. I can search for words like enable and it will find all instances of that word. So as you can see, GPO Compare 2.5 has taken on quite a bit new functionality and features. We’re also still including support for power shell within the group policy management or the group policy compare interface, so you can now do power shell based GPO comparisons for up to four live or backup GPOs, so that functionality remains and our commitment to power shell remains as well.
I’d like to this opportunity to invite you to check out GPO Compare 2.5. You can register on our website for an evaluation that will give you up to 14 days of fully functional group policy comparisons for administrative template settings. And if you need further evaluations, we can get you additional trial licenses as well. Thanks for listening and we look forward to helping you out with your group policy management needs.