Location: Free Tools » Resources
NetWrix Group Policy Change Reporter - for Group Policy change auditing. They offer a free and paid version of their product.
SDM Software, provides a whole suite of tools for better managing Group Policy. These include:
GPexpert(tm) Scripting Toolkit: The only product on the market that lets you automate changes and audits of Group Policy Settings, using VBscript or PowerShell.
GPExpert(tm) Troubleshooting Pak: Four products that help you track down and solve Group Policy problems.
GPExpert(tm) Desktop Policy Manager: An innovative product that lets you manage desktop configuration using Group Policy, from a browser-based interface that provides approval-based workflows.
Group Policy Health Cmdlet: Provides a PowerShell-based command-line tool for retrieving Group Policy status across multiple machines in your AD environment
Quest Software is a familar name in the AD management space, have Group Policy change control products and Quest has some Group Policy extension products as well.
Centrify extends Group Policy to the non-Windows environments with their DirectControl. Most interestingly, they have DirectControl Group Policy for the MacOS! Pretty cool
NetPro is another familar name in the AD management space, have Group Policy change control products.
Another vendor for GP Extensions, GPO change tracking and version control is NetIQ, who acquired their products from Full Armor--one of the early vendors in the Group policy space. Full Armor has a set of GP products as well.
Check out the GP products from the Swedish company Special Operations Software. They have a couple of interesting GP-related products, including SpecOpsDeploy, which extends what you can do with GP-based software installation, and SpecOps Password Policy, which lets you set different password policies within a single AD domain.
This is a pretty cool. Its a free GPO-based utility for managing power settings on a PC: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_pm_ez_gpo