Category: Tip
Windows Update for Business Group Policy Changes for Windows 10 1607
If you have deployed Windows 10 to your organisation then you might be familiar with the new Group Policy setting that allowed you to defer the upgrade of Windows 10. These policy setting also know as “Windows Update for Business” allows you to delay by up to 8 months the OS upgrade that Microsoft delivers to you via Windows Update (see below)….
Office 2016 Administration Templates and Conversion Tool
In case you missed it the Office 2016 ADMX templates are no longer part of the Office Resource Kit like previous version. You can download the ADMX files here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49030 Also, if you have a bunch of Office 2013 GPO setting you want to copy across to Office 2016 policy you can also there is a PowerShell script on GitHub…
How to stop local administrators from bypassing Group Policy
Before I begin this article might be, for some of you, this will be well know information and it might all seem rather logical. But I continue to see questions being asked on forums as how as a Group Policy administrator can I prevent my users with local admin making a specific change or installing software/drivers on their own computer. The short answer is you…
Internet Explorer 11 Group Policy Preferences
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…
Native Boot to Desktop Group Policy Support for Windows 8.1
Microsoft has just released the RTM version for people who have MSDN or TechNet subscriptions of Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 (see http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2013/09/09/attention-technet-and-msdn-subscribers-windows-server-2012-r2-available-for-download-today.aspx). The really great new about this release is that there are a few new Group Policy setting, most notably NATIVE support for IT Administrators to configured boot to desktop. The setting name is called “Go…
Slow Group Policy Troubleshooting Guide
Ever wondered why the computers in your organisation are so slow? Well Darren Mar-Elia has just posted an extensive article on TechNet called Group Policy and Logon Impact. His blog goes into great detail explaining many of the pit fall’s IT Admins can do that cause large impact to logon speed and group policy processing. The summary tips of the…
What services to disable to optimize Windows for VDI
In my previous VDI blog post about configuring Windows to work best in a VDI environment I mentioned a few service that should be disabled to improve performance. However a a recent session at Microsoft Management Summit 2013 called Optimizing Windows 8 for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure has provided a substantially longer list of recommend services configuration for VDI. Below is…
Missing Internet Explorer Maintenance option from GPMC with Windows 7 / 2008 R2
One of the changes with Windows 8 and Group Policy was that the Internet Explorer Maintenance section of GPMC was removed from under Windows Settings (see Interesting Change to Group Policy in Server 2012/Windows 8). However people have been noticing that the same Internet Explorer Maintenance option is removed from GPMC when they now install IE 10 on Windows 7…
