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…

Microsoft has now released the latest version of the Security Compliance Manager v2.5 tool. This FREE tool is your one stop shop for downloading the best practice security guidance and configuration setting for your Microsoft programs. It also allows you to import existing Group Policy Object to then compare these setting against Microsoft template or other custom baseline templates. This…

Microsoft has just released Security Compliance Manager v2.5 beta https://connect.microsoft.com/site715/program2682 along with a heap of new security baseline for you to use to compare against your environment. In case you are not familiar with SCM then it is a great product from Microsoft that consolidates all the best practice for their software with in-depth explanation for each setting. Notably this…

I just came across a video on TechNet Edge about Security Compliance Manager v2 with Jose & Jeff who work on this product. This video talks about the evolution of the product and has some great demo’s of the product. Video Source at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/Video/hh559198 If you would like to know more then check out one of my many SCM blog…

Microsoft has made available the final version Microsoft Security Compliance Manager v2 available for download. In case you don’t already know SCM is a great security analysis tool for your Microsoft products that works great with Group Policy but also with SCCM Desired Configuration Management (DCM) and Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP). If you want to learn more about SCM…

A new version of the super awesome Security Compliance Manager v2 has now been released to the public on the connect web site. If you may remember Microsoft released the CTP version of this product back in march which had some of the new features: Ability to Import GPO’s into Custom Baseline Templates Ability to install without having to install…

Speakers: Tom Cloward and Jeff Sigman Source http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WSV325