Fellow Australian and Microsoft Hyper-V Program Manager Ben Armstrong (a.k.a. Virtual PC Guy) has just published a blog explaining how you can deploy group policy object to be only targeting to virtual servers (see Targeting Group Policy at Hyper-V VMs). To do this he explains that you can create a WMI query filter that means the Group Policy object will…

Microsoft has just released the Administrative Templates (ADMX/ADML) files that allow you to configure their newest Group Policy Administrative Template setting for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 on down level Operating Systems. To be clear this just enables you to edit the Group Policy objects on a down level computer, not make them apply. To install both of…

A long time ago did a blog post explaining how to use the Group Policy Preferences Local Users setting to manager the password of the local accounts. This post explained how to do it  in a way that minimised the exposure of the password in Active Directory (see  How to use Group Policy Preferences to change account Passwords ) for…

With the release of Internet Explorer 11 from Microsoft for Windows 7 I have seen a number of question asking where are the Group Policy Preferences are for this new version of the browser? The good news is that the current Internet Explorer 10 Group Policy Preferences officially supported see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2898604 . This works as the default version checking goes…

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 today and as part of this release they have also made the ADM files available for download. This enables Group Policy administrators to manage IE11 using administrator templates without having to install Windows 8.1. In fact if you load these templates you can still modify the IE 11 Group Policy settings from…

Update: It’s been pointed out that column D does represent if it is a new policy setting which has revealed many more settings. The complete reference guild to all the new Windows 8 group policy setting has now been published. A quick search through this spread sheet show there are 216 new administrative settings (27 161 Unique) specific to Windows…

Have you ever applied a Group Policy and then waited the standard 90 minutes for the setting to apply only to find out that after a few hours the policy still has not been set yet. Even trying to force a GPUPDATE still does not trigger the change but then the next day the policy has applied as expected. What…

With yet another release of Windows (seems like it was only last year… errr… wait), Microsoft has also released a new version of the remote server admin tools (a.k.a. RSAT). RSAT allow you to install the tools needed to manage your servers from a Windows 8.1 computer. You might not think you need the RSAT installed as you are just…