Chapter 10

This chapter covered how to plan a group policy management and implementation strategy. GP settings are controlled by an MMC snap-in called Policy Management. It includes a suite of tools that allows an admin to run GP backups, produces reports of how settings on AD policies of various levels, etc. Starter GPO's are templates that an administrator can use to create GPO's for their organization. Each new group policy made with the starter GPO will inherit the settings of the template. Security group filtering allows GPO settings to be applied to specified people within the organization, allowing those with the need to access certain resources or applications able to use them, even if the GPO setting would not normally allow it. WMI filtering allows an admin to create queries based on the configuration of a system and its hardware in order to determine where a GPO will be applied. Once a series of GP settings is implemented (the total of all settings is called a resultant set of policy) it can be difficult to predict the final outcome. There are a few tools (resultant set of policy wizard, GP results & GP modeling components of GP management and GPResult command-line tool) that can analyze and report the final set of policy and its affects on a user's computing environment.