Group Policy Central

A video by fellow MVP Kurt Roggen  has just been released on TechNet Edge about the Advanced Group Policy Management tool. I have posted a few article about AGPM before (starting here) but this video is a great primer for the product talking about what it does, how to install it and how to use the product.

Source http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/Video/hh706152

Speaker: Jennelle Crothers

Source: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL311

Speaker: Jeremy Moskowitz

Source http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL308

I have posted about the Advanced Group Policy Management (aka AGPM) server tool previously explaining how to install it and use in in your environment to safely modify your Group Policies Object However Ned Pyle from Microsoft has done a post that goes into great detail what happen behind the scenes when you “Control” or makes changes to existing uncontrolled GPO’s in AGPM (see below).

Check it out his article at http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2011/01/31/agpm-production-gpos-under-the-hood.aspx

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 GPO design decision together to best ensure that you have the most efficient design possible. However if you have an existing OU structure designed a lot of these guidelines can still be applied to most existing environments.

As in Part 1 these are simply guidelines that I use and should not be taken as hard an fast rules. I quite often finding myself having to break these rules due to real world conflicts or just because one rule might conflict with the other rule. If you do find your self in a situation where you are not sure which path to take try to chose the option that will result in the least administrative effort in the long term.

Continue reading ‘Best Practice: Group Policy Design Guidelines – Part 2’ »