"The Group Policy Experts"
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"The Group Policy Experts"
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Group Policy Resources/Products On this page:
To start with, there is my gptalk mailing list, which is a listserv dedicated to Group Policy questions and their solutions. Another good resource for help on GPOs, and pretty much everything else related to Windows, is Mark Minasi's Forum. There's a forum group on that site specifically focused on Group Policy, which I moderate on, found here. I have also created a Group Policy blog that you can read and comment on here. There's also occasional GP banter on the ActiveDir mailing list (www.activedir.org) Jeremy Moskowitz, author of the popular GP book, "Group Policy, Profiles, and IntelliMirror for Windows 2003, Windows 2000, and Windows XP" maintains an excellent Group Policy community forum at his website www.gpanswers.com. Jeremy also provides Group Policy training classes for folks who want to learn more about Group Policy from an expert in person. Check it out! In terms of other GP related web pages, here are a couple of good ones: Mark Heitbrink's excellent German Group Policy site: http://www.grurili.de Hans Straat's www.datacrash.net, which has policy and other related Windows information.
The Server 2003 Resource Kit contains some very useful, but often missed tools for GPO troubleshooting. They are described here. GPMonitor: This utility is composed of a service and GUI administrative tool. The service gets installed on any and all of your servers and workstations. There is also an accompanying ADM file that lets you set the behavior of the service. What this thing does is, each time policy is refreshed, either in the foreground or in the background, the service generates an RSoP XML report (so presumably this only works on XP and Server 2003). That report is then sent up to a server share you specify via the ADM file. So, if you have this service on 100 workstations, then 100 files are sent up to the server share each time policy is refreshed on a node. Actually, this is also configurable via the ADM so you can have it only send the file up every nth time that policy is refreshed. Using the UI tool, shown below, you can examine the RSoP in the GPMC-familiar format.
WinPolicies: WinPolicies is a GUI GPO Troubleshooting utility. Given that its a Resource Kit tool, its pretty rough, and presumes some strong knowledge of GPOs, which logs are useful and some of the more arcane aspects of GPO, like "history" information, but it has some good info there and worth playing around with. The following screen shot shows the kind of info it delivers.
ADMX is a Server 2003 Resource Kit utility that lets you compare the contents of two ADM template files and optionally write the differences to a file. ADMX comes as an MSI package within the Resource Kit and must first be installed. Once installed, it requires the .Net Framework version 1.0 to run. It will not run with later versions of the framework. The tool is neat because it will tell you which policy items are missing from each file and will also tell you which have been renamed. This is handy when you're getting ready to upgrade Windows and the newer version comes with new ADM files (e.g. going from XP, SP1 to SP2). And of course, the download site for the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC). Note that the SP1 version of the GPMC is the most recent release.
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Copyright © 2006
GPOGUY.COM
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Good paper
entitled "Deploying Group Policy Using Vista" here:
