In this video, Darren Mar-Elia, SDM Software’s CTO and Founder, demonstrates the SDM Software GPO Exporter product, a tool that quickly and easily document your Group Policy Environment. Whether you are trying to discover an existing environment, find overlapping or redundant settings to prepare for a GPO cleanup, or just need to know where a particular setting is coming from, the Exporter makes the job easy. And with the PowerShell interface, you can easily script GPO setting discovery based on your needs.
Video Transcript
This is Darren Mar-Elia CTO & Founder of SDM Software and the GPOGuy.com website. SDM Software is the leader in solutions for group policy management.
Today I am going to walk you through a quick demo of our powerful GPO Exporter tool, part of the GPO Reporting Pak that includes Exporter and our GPO Compare product. GPO Exporter lets you create reports of GPO settings across all GPO’s in your domains. You can use it to search for a particular setting or settings within the domain and it helps you look for conflicting settings across GPO’s. The tool generates reports in a variety of formats including CSV, PDF and Excel. There is also a PowerShell interface thatlets you export settings from the command line. Let’s take a look at the product now.
I’m going to go ahead and run the ExportWizard that let’s me choose a domain unless we included optionally metadata associated with each GPO or control the delimiter that used to separateout assets and values. I will go ahead and choose the defaults and when I choose the defaults I am ableto choose the GPO’s that I wish to export. I can select the GPO’s within the domain or I can select all GPO’s. I then have the ability to export specific policy areas within the GPO’s that I have selected or all policy areas and then I will go ahead and choose all. Now the export is going to run and it is basically going out to my domain and grabbing all of the settings out of all the GPO’s in my environment I have about 250 GPO’s in this particular domain and grabbing all of the settings data and returning it in a list to that let’s me output that data in various formats or searchon it or sort it or do any kind of organization I want to the settings.
Now that it is returned to the settings, you can see a list of all of the GPO’s. You can see here that I have got 10,031 settings returned and it returns all of the settings related to each of the GPO’s and the setting path and the setting value. I can search for particular setting keyword: For example password. Go ahead and search and I can find here that in this account policy test I have a maximum password each found. I’m going to go ahead and search, continue to search in across multiple GPO’s. If I wanted to find out for example how many places or how many GPO’s have set the enforced password history, I can also sortthe list and I am sorting the list by essentially path name, setting path nameand that lets me go to a particular path or GPO setting that I’m interested in and then I can search until I find the setting area that I’m interested in, in this case the fourth password history. And I can see that indeed it is set in a number of different GPO’s and with different values so I can see possible conflicts between these settingsacross all of my GPO’s. If I had exported metadata would have allowed me to actually see where the GPO’s were linked. In terms of reporting I have the option to go ahead and generate a report of all of the settings or specific settings that I am interested in I could go ahead and click the generate settings report and you will see here that it creates a nice file that I can use for printing or output to PDF for itself. I can also say a particular export ofGPO settings as a CSV file and load it previously safe report this gives me the ability to save of snapshots at my group policy environment and then be ableto retrieve those and view them and search through them at a later date. And that concludes this part of the demo,next we will look at the PowerShell Interface in the GPO exporter.
Okay, now let’s go ahead and look at the PowerShell Interface and the GPO Exporter. I’m just going to go ahead and show youa quick example of how you can use the exporter with PowerShell to get sort of the power and flexibility of each. I’m going to go ahead and call the exporter command just called Export SDMGP settings with the all parameter. The all parameter actually goes in four of my current domain grabs all GPO’s all setting areas and dumps it to whatis essentially a PowerShell object that you can then manipulate, search on, export to,to see if it is CSV or whichever format you find useful. You can use it and PowerShell to do a lot of filtering and essentially a fine grain control over the output at the GPO content. So the Export SDMGP settings cmdlet provides a lot of the same functionality as the GUI, but you get the flexibility of using PowerShell and as you can see from the output. Let’s go ahead and move up to the top here. We have got the name of the GPO, the paththat the setting exists and the setting value and I can do things like searching on particular setting values, searching for a particular pads with using PowerShell, I could pipe this output to other command-lets to perform other additional automation tasks.
That concludes the demo of GPO Exporter. Thanks for watching this demo. I encourage you to visit our website at www.SDMSoftware.com to get more information about our products, or you can download a demo version of the Exporter product. Thanks very much.