Group Policy FAQ -1

1. What is Group Policy?

Group Policy is an important and powerful feature included with Windows 2000 Active Directory. If you are familiar with System Policies in Windows NT you know that they had limitations, settings applied in the registry were sometimes difficult to reverse (known commonly as tattooing the registry) and it was near impossible to limit the scope of System Policies from applying to the entire domain (including Administrators and Servers).

Group Policy has very few of the limitations that System Policy had. Functionality has been provided for registry-based policy settings, security settings, software installation, scripts (computer start-up and shutdown, user logon and logoff), folder redirection, Software Distribution and can be extended to include more. Group Policy includes hundreds of settings that can be defined centrally by an administrator.

Group Policy is now much more scaleable using a variety of different methods to control the Group Policies that are applied and to which objects they are applied to, this is commonly known as Scope of Management (SOM). Group Policy Objects can be linked (applied) to groups of users or computers based on the Organisation Structure, all members of an OU for example would have the same GPO(s) applied. Group Policy Objects can also be applied based on the computers network location, for example all Computers in the same AD Site (a group of IP subnets) or from the Domain level.

As well as applying Group Policies at the Domain, AD Site and OU level, each Group Policy Object has an ACL so you can Apply or Deny Group Policy Objects based on a Users or Computers Group Membership, this is known as Group Filtering.

In addition to Group filtering, Microsoft introduced WMI filters in Windows 2003/Windows XP (See working with WMI Filters for more detail). WMI was made an integral part of the Windows 2000 (and then XP/2003) operating system and provides access to nearly every hardware and software object in the computing environment such as free disk space, total physical memory, network card configuration, hardware chassis type etc. Using a WMI Filter an Admin can ensure that only computers matching a specific criteria (for example “All computers running Windows XP”) will have a GPO applied.

As you can see, Group Policy is a very powerful and scaleable tool that can be used to help manage your clients, users and server environments from a central location.

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