Knowing your GPPs from your GPSes

In my last set of articles I discussed why managing systems via Group Policy Objects (GPOs) is easier, especially for junior administrators who either don’t know the scripting languages or the ins and outs of the operating systems and applications they manage. Today we're focussed on what the Windows NT6 operating systems, ( …

[Thomas Bottrill]

Mistake?

Are scenarios 4 & 5 the wrong way round?

[Trevor_Pott]

@Thomas Bottrill

Hi Thomas,

Quite right. Thank you for catching that!

[phil_oakley]

Campaign for plain english

"So the GPP enhancements that ship with AGPM as part of the MDOP for NT6 are not a replacement for GPSes, but an overall enhancement to GPO systems management. They help enhance the value of using Microsoft’s AD" - if not the english language .....

[Anonymous Coward]

CP

that'd be English, not english.

Next you'll be suggesting that there is such a language as English (United Kingdom). :)

By the way, surely Group Policy Settings is already plural so GPSes is just wrong, not merely something about which fans of plain English should complain?

[Trevor_Pott]

You know, I thought about that quite a bit...

But how to you deal with "a single group policy setting" versus "many group policy settings?" The same acronym for both, and leave it up to the reader to decide if it should be read as plural? Using any acronym that many times in a single work would have gotten me shot back in English class, but I fail to see how it’s even possible to avoid them when writing about IT.

I’m honestly a little fuzzy on the grammatical rules of dealing with acronym alphabet soup. Until I started writing these articles, I never realised exactly what my mates and I must sound like when we talk. Holy TLAs batman!

[Bibbleq]

Policy preferences dont need MDOP

Group Policy preferences don't require the AGPM. You can do preferences from any Server 2008 or 2008 R2 machine & apply them to your enterprise...

[Trevor_Pott]

@Bibbleq

Would you be so kind as to expand upon the how? Everything I have seen requires the AGPM, and I wasn't able to find any way to create or administer them without the AGPM.

I know that once created, they are simply part fo the AD and will cheerfully live on any DC. (Indeed, you do not even require a Server 2008 schema to use them; the original DesktopStandard Policymaker ran jsut fine on XP and Server 2003.) AFAIK creating and administering them is the issue.

[Bibbleq]

@Trevor_Pott

Hi Trevor, I have replied via the "contact the author" option from the main article... If you don't get it let me know.

Ta

Ben.

[Danvighar]

GPPs adding function

Discovered GPPs - and specifically, Item-level Targetting (will you be covering that?) just a few months ago.

I've found GPPs to be incredibly useful in enhancing the level of control and security compliance in my network - policies that I used to have to kludge an ADM template together for, I can now perform via GPP. Their mere existance lets me simplify management of my non-GPS policies immensely, and some of the additional features like Item-level targetting let me consolidate policies heavily without having to keep a script file updated with every name change, etc, as the network evolves.