Reporting Group Policy

Windows supports an enhanced Group Policy infrastructure that uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to enable more efficient planning and debugging policy settings. This structure provides public methods that expose what an extension to Group Policy would do in a hypothetical situation, and what the extension has done in an actual situation. This enables administrators to determine the combination of policy settings that apply to, or will apply to, a user or computer. This is known as the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP).

System administrators must know how policy settings affect computers and users in a managed environment. This information is essential when planning policy for a network and when debugging existing policy. Obtaining the information can be a complex task when you consider the many possible combinations of sites, domains, and organizational units, and the many types of Group Policy extensions that can exist. Security-group filtering and the inheritance, blocking, and overriding of group policies further complicate the task.

The enhanced RSoP infrastructure enables third-party vendors to create products and tools for policy planning and diagnostics. Auditing, reporting, and change management tools based on WMI will communicate with the WMI infrastructure through the RSoP snap-in.

For more information, see the following topics:

• RSoP Architecture
• About the RSoP Snap-in
• About the RSoP WMI Method Provider
• Supporting and extending RSoP
• RSoP Delegation

Note

If you are writing an extension to Group Policy, WMI-enable the extension to support RSoP. For more information, see Implementing RSoP Support for a Client-side Extension.