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Group Policy Survival Guide

  • Article

This is a list of Group Policy resources. You can add resources you find useful, and/or rearrange the ones that are here, for example, by adding new sections.

What's going on

Concepts & How To 

Planning & Deployment

Technical References

Documents

Troubleshooting

Download

Tools

  • Group Policy Management Console (GPMC): A new and comprehensive administrative tool for Group Policy management. GPMC integrates the existing Group Policy functionality of the property pages on the Active Directory administrative tools into a single, unified console dedicated to Group Policy management tasks; GPMC also expands management capabilities with new features.
  • Gpresult: A tool that displays the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) information for a remote user and computer.
  • Gpupdate: A tool that you can use to manually update any changes that are made to group policies (some changes can be made immediately.
  • Gpotool: A tool that you can use to check the health of the Group Policy objects on domain controllers.
  • Recreatedefpol.exe: A tool developed to restore the Default Domain policies in case of accidental deletion for Windows 2000. For the Windows Server 2003, please use Dcgpofix.exe instead (included in Windows Server 2003).
  • Group Policy Inventory (GPInventory.exe): A tool allows administrators to collect Group Policy and other information from any number of computers in their network by running multiple Resultant Set of User Policy (RSOP) or Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) queries. The query results can be exported to either an XML or a text file, and can be analyzed in Excel.
  • Group Policy Search: Web app (hosted on Azure) allowing you to search all group policy settings available for Windows, Office and IE. E.G. search 'Wallpaper' to find all settings that relate to wallpaper
    Windows Phone App     - Search for Group Policy Search in the store or download the XAP and install manually
  • Search Connector for Windows Explorer - Search Group Policy Settings straight from Windows Explorer's search bar. Unfortunately, this points to the old site URL. Just open the OSDX file in notepad and change the URL to "http://gpsearch.azurewebsites.net/gps/rss.ashx?search={searchTerms}"
  • Group Policy Log View: A utility that you can use to export Group Policy event data from the system and operational log into a text, HTML, or XML files. The supported operating system is Windows Vista.
  • Policy Reporter V4: A free software from SysPro which formats the log provided in %systemRoot%\Debug\UserMode to give a more meaningful display. This latest version also displays the logs created when processing Preferences. It provides a tree structure on the left which shows major events reported in the Log. Selecting an entry in the tree structure displays that section of the log in the view window.
  • Free GPOGuy tools A lot of interesting Toos like: command line remote GPO refresh, Group Policy Software Installation Viewer Utility, WMI Filter Validation Utility etc.

Blogs

Forums

Useful KBs

Scripts

Hands On Lab 

Books

Trainings

  • Online Training

    • Course 6719: Troubleshooting Group Policy Issues in Windows Server 2008
    • Course 6178: Designing AD DS Group Policy in Windows Server 2008
    • Course 6715: Configuring User Environments by Using Group Policy in Windows Server 2008
    • Course 6716: Implementing Security by Using Group Policy in Windows Server 2008
    • Course 6714: Configuring Group Policy Objects in Windows Server 2008 
  • Classroom Training
    • Course 50255A: Managing, Maintaining, and Securing Your Networks Through Group Policy

 Videos

See Also