Ned Pyle from the Active Directory Service team has just done a super post to the Ask the Directory Services Team called Post-Graduate AD Studies. This is a collection of links to pretty much every AD/Group Policy related TechNet article known to man. Definitely a post that you will want to bookmark to use as a reference whenever you have…

In my previous article In this article Best Practice:Active Directory Structure Guidelines – Part 1 I spoke about some of the guidelines I personally use when developing an Active Directory OU structure. In this next part I will discuss some guidelines I use when designing a Group Policy Object infrastructure. Ideally you should make the the Active Directory OU and…

This weeks group policy setting on the week is one that most IT administrators will probably want to implement. Now for personal use the Windows logon sound is quite nice however when you have an office packed with computers it can sound like a symphony in the morning as everyone turns on their computer. This is a new policy setting…

I have been doing Active Directory and Group Policy work for a while now and I have developed my own set of rules that I try to use where ever possible. So below I have written down all my rules in no particular order for you to go over and use for yourself. You may only chose to use only…

I was recently approached to do a book review on “Least Privilege Security for Windows 7,Vista and XP by Russell Smith” published by Packt Publishing. This book is a comprehensive guide at showing how to configure your Windows environment so that your users can operate without administrator permissions. While most administrators realise that giving administrators access to the end users…

In this article I am going to talk about how you can use Group Policy to control the firewall that comes out of the box with Windows but first I want to give you a bit of history of the evolution of host based firewall in Windows. Firewalls have long been around for year protecting internal corporate networks from outside…

This weeks setting is one that has just been mentioned in the AD Blogs Friday mail sack and until today was a setting/feature of Windows Vista/7 that I didn’t know existed. This setting display information about previous logons during a user logon and is very similar to the last logon screen I see when logging onto an online banking web…

During Kevin Sullivan Group Policy session at TechEd 2010 in the USA this year he mentioned an example of a being able to configure group policy to allow users to select whatever screensaver they want except the one called “(None)” (see image below). While this method does not prevent the users from select the (None) from the screensaver options list…