We’re here at MMS 2012 in Las Vegas this week (see a picture of our booth attached to this post!) talking to customers about their Group Policy needs. A couple of interesting themes emerged. One is kind of humorous. More often than not, when someone walked by and we asked whether they managed Group Policy, they would usually groan and say something like, “Unfortunately, yes”. That’s interesting because it seems like more folks find GP a drudgery rather than the powerful time-saver it should be. The other theme that emerged is that lots of folks want to clean up, reduce and consolidate their GPOs. The reasons for this ranged from poor desktop performance as the result of too many GPOs to just needing to get a handle of what GPOs were deployed in the environment. To that end, we were demo-ing the GPO Reporting Pak, composed of GPO Compare and GPO Exporter. It was cool to see that people got the power of these products for getting at the inconsistencies, duplications and unused GPOs that exist within many GP environments, after years of adding, copying and messing with GPOs. I even had one customer tell me that, based on the advice of a Group Policy expert, they had created lots of small GPOs and now were faced with hundreds of GPOs that needed cleanup. Goes to show that even the experts get it wrong sometimes!
Today we’ll be showing more stuff, like an early version of our Group Policy Health Compliance Reporter! Should be fun.
Stop by if you’re at MMS and say hi!
Darren
The lots of small GPOs has been a constant debate for ever!!! Seeing customers with hundreds of GPOs and the organizational and performance issues is painful. With better reporting and searching capabilities folks should know better at this point. But most of these people have lots on their plate and becoming an ‘expert’ in GP is not high on their priority list.
Man I wish I was at MMS this year! Hope you are having fun.
Kevin