There is a setting in Internet Explorer that is called “Always switch to new tabs when they are created” which as the name suggests controls how tabs in the browser are created. This setting can of course be controlled via Group Policy so that tabs will either appear in the background or foreground in the browser when a user opens…

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…

If you have ever seen Chris Jacksons (a.k.a. App Compat Guy) sessions you will know that he is an amazing speaker with a very distinctive (and geeky) presentation style. So when I had the opportunity to present with him at TechEd New Zealand 2013 I was super excited to be able present some of the great new features in Internet…

Having been a Group Policy MVP for a while and a contributor to the Microsoft Group Policy forums for even longer I still see a lot of people asking “I am new to Group Policy. What settings should I configure?”. My answer to these people is now pretty much unconditionally “nothing”. That’s right… Nothing…. Of course that is not the…

If you are like me and are forever forgetting where exactly a group policy setting is location or what it was exactly called then you probably have frequented the Group Policy Search Engine (previous at gps.cloudapp.net). However this web site no longer exists but thankfully it has move to http://gpsearch.azurewebsites.net/. If you have never used this web site before you…

You may already be aware there is a pretty serious vulnerability with Java that has just been patched (see Security Alert for CVE-2013-0422 Released ) on pretty much all versions of the program. For some people however this may get them questioning if they need Java installed at all on their computers. Personally I have uninstalled Java off my friends and…

Along with the recent release of Windows 8 Microsoft also released Windows RT which is pretty much Windows 8 designed to operate on ARM based processors. For consumers the most obvious difference of this OS is the lack of ability to run legacy software. In enterprises however the biggest missing feature is that this OS is not joinable to a…

Finally!!! Microsoft have uploaded the video of the last of three sessions I presented this year for TechEd New Zealand. In this session I talk about and demo some of the new features of Group Policy in Windows 8. I did have some technical demo issues along the way however this session was still had really great feedback. Session Description…