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…

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…

The beta of Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 beta has now been released to the public for testing. For your benefit I have parsed through the complete list of hotfixes and I have listed out all the group policy specific setting. If you just want the service pack right now you can download it here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ff183870.aspx I have…

The setting of the week this week prevents users from running Windows Media Center on Vista or above versions. Unlike Windows XP which had its own dedicated version of Media Center, Vista Enterprise and Ultimate editions and Windows 7 Business, Enterprise and Ultimate had inbuilt support Windows Media Center. This setting would most likely be used in a corporate environment…

This year Microsoft are now making available for everyone the videos screen cast from the TechEd USA conference on the TechEd web site. So if you attended TechEd USA this year but didn’t get to see all the sessions or if you just missed out on going all together you can now check out all the session at http://www.msteched.com For…

This weeks setting is a native policy for Windows Vista (or greater) called “Assign a default domain for logon”. As the name suggest it configured the default domain name when a user logs on to the computer. This is very handy in a multi domain environment or if you want to make sure that your newly built computer default to…

This weeks Group Policy setting should be used in environments where you still use a logon script. While I implore you stop using logon scripts (see http://www.ihatelogonscripts.com ) they are still out there for a majority of customers and as such still need to be properly managed. This setting is called “Maximum wait time for Group Policy scripts” but it…

In this weeks setting I look at a new Windows 7 setting that reverts the sort order of folders back to the old way it would sort files and folder the same as Windows 2000 (and earlier). This policy setting is called “Turn off numerical sorting in Windows Explorer and can be found under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative…