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Last month me and some collegues went to MMS2008 in Las Vegas were I saw a cool demo of Group Police Preferences. The name Group Policy Preferences did ring a bell with me and suddenly I remembered. A few weeks before MMS I saw a Windows Update that was called Group Policy Preferences Client Side Extensions, but I did’nt know what it was.

So now that I’m a few weeks back home I finaly had some time to play with it on my Demo Domain that I setup last week using CoreConfigurator. To use Group Policy Preferences you must have a few things in place:

• A Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista SP1 machine (only needed for managing Group Policy Preferences)
• RSAT Installed on the management machine
• Deployed the Group Policy Preferences Client Side Extensions to your Desktops/Servers (XP SP2 or higher)
• Active Directory

Note : You don’t need a 2008 DC or Windows Vista SP1 client to use Group Policy Preferences !!

On the left screenshot you can see all the different options that can be managed using Group Policy Preferences. There ar too much settings to show them all on this blog, but I realy like to show you some nice things. I made some screenshots of some common things you normaly do in loginscripts or kix scripts, but that are now possible in Group Policy. (click on the images to see it full size)

With Group Policy Preferences it is easy to map networkdrives. Not only you can map a drive for all users in a generic user policy, but it is also  possible to target this mapping to no more then 27 targeting rules. (Image on the right)

Most common is to map a network share based on group membership or IP subnet. This way way it is possible to map a share witf for example application data to a server that is on the same geographical location as the user without the need of using DFS or site loginscripts.

An other example is setting up how users (or administrators) see their files in Windows Explorer. In this screenshot I set it up so that the user will see the file extentions for known files and also shows hidden & system files, this is a setting that most admins will set if they logon to a new machine. This is also the power of Group Policy Preferences, the most settings an administrator will have to manualy do if he is building a new image for deployment can be managed by Group Policy Preferences.

As you can imagine there are hundreds or maybe thousends of possibilities that you use in solving those anoying problems you usely have to solve using scripts or other tools.

Next thing I have to do is migrating my loginscript at home to Group Policy Preferences.

Have fun with it.

Erik Luppes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 1:28 pm and is filed under General, Server 2008, Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.