Supporting and Extending RSoP

To facilitate policy-setting planning and debugging, Windows supports an enhanced Group Policy infrastructure that uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). This structure provides public methods that expose what an extension to Group Policy would do in a what-if situation, and what the extension has done in an actual situation. This enables administrators to determine the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) for a specific combination of policy settings. For more information, see About the RSoP WMI Method Provider.

If you use Administrative Templates to extend registry-based policy, your application automatically supports RSoP. In other situations, you must consider the RSoP infrastructure.

Client-side extensions. If you write a client-side extension to Group Policy, you must implement support for RSoP by WMI-enabling the extension.

For more information, see the following topics:

• Writing a Group Policy Extension
• Implementing RSoP Support for a Client-side Extension

Server-side extensions. If you write a server-side extension snap-in to the Group Policy Object Editor, you must support RSoP. This is a common task and you can use the same user interface when creating your own RSoP tools.

For more information, see the following topics:

• Creating an RSoP User Interface
• Adding RSoP to your Extension Snap-in
• Developing an RSoP Management Tool
• Implementing RSoP on the Server