This whitepaper provides an overview of the requirements for using the new Group Policy Preferences feature, and a quick overview of each new policy area within the product. Click on the Read More link below to download the PDF.

Group Policy leverages a complex and sometimes inconsistent model when it comes to storing the settings that you specify within a Group Policy Object (GPO). This is probably owing to the fact that, while there is a central group at Microsoft that is responsible for the Group Policy infrastructure, each product area that has policy settings (e.g. Security, IE, desktop) is responsible for implementing its own policy tools to leverage that infrastructure. As a result, policy settings for a given GPO may be scattered between file system storage and AD-based storage. To better understand this, let’s take a quick look at how Group Policy Objects are structured.

Whitepaper describing how to use the Software Installation feature in Group Policy.
(3rd party whitepaper--requires registration)

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Whitepaper describing the security of the Group Policy infrastructure itself (3rd party whitepaper--requires registration)

(reproduced from my original posting on Mark Minasi's Forum, with some embellishments)

This is really more of a checklist of the kinds of things that typically go wrong in GPO processing, and how you can check for them.

Group Policy Objects (GPOs) are processed by computer and user objects in AD. This processing occurs in two different ways. Specifically, GPOs are processed in the foreground during specific events and in the background on a periodic basis. Table 1 describes when each processing mode is triggered.