About Group Policy Preferences
Group Policy preferences enable administrators to configure, deploy, and manage greater numbers of operating system and application settings. For more information about managing Windows with Group Policy preferences, see Information about new Group Policy preferences in Windows Server 2008.
To configure the preferences for an application that is currently unsupported by Group Policy preferences, you can create your own property sheet extension for the Application preference item. The XML DOM-based plug-in architecture is designed to enable any experienced software developer to write a fully integrated, graphical extension to Group Policy preferences.
The plug-in model is based on the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) property sheet extension model. Although writing a robust MMC snap-in can be a complex task, implementation of a single property sheet extension is designed to be simple for an experienced software developer. A snap-in extension is implemented as a single COM object and can be built as a single self-registering DLL.
Before attempting the procedure presented in this section, read the following sections of the MMC documentation that discuss extending the MMC model:
For more information about how to extend the Applications preference extension property sheet, see Extending the Applications Snap-in. The full code example for the extension to the Applications preference snap-in is provided. For more information about how to find a description of the full code sample, see Applications Snap-in Extension Sample Code.