Posted in Security Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to mitigate security issue KB981374

There is currently a security advisory out about a Zero Day vulnerability in Internet Explore 6 & 7 on Windows XP and Vista. While there is no patch out for this issues so far you can mitigate the security a number ways using Group Policy. Below I have listed two ways to implement the workaround as listed by Microsoft using…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to configure Internet Explorer security zone sites

As you know Group Policy Preferences are these fantastic new settings that allow IT administrators perform any configuration they want on a users group using Group Policy… well almost..  In this tutorial I will show you how to configured one of the few settings that are not controlled by preferences but can be configured using a native Group Policy. The…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to configure home page settings – Part 2

In part 2 of how to use Group Policy to configure a users home page I will be show you how to use Group Policy Preferences to configure a users home page. There really isn’t a right way you can set the users home pages setting it is really up to your requirements and how much control you want to…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to restore missing second printer in Windows 7

Aamer Shedam from Microsoft’s Ask the Performance Team has just blogged about how Windows 7 will only show one printer in “Devices and Printers” if you have that same two printers installed on the one computer (see below). If your an IT Administrator and you want to configured the “Printer” view in Windows Explorer to show an icon for each…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to configure home page settings – Part 1

One of the most common setting that Group Policy is used for it so configure browser home pages settings. There are a number of ways that this can be done in Part 1 i am going to go thought the changing the Home Page setting using a native Group Policy. In Part 2 I will explain how to configure home…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to disable USB drives on Windows XP

In my previous article “How to use Group Policy to make USB drives read only on Windows XP” I showed you you could configure Windows XP to prevent users from writing to USB block level devices. However for some organisations just making drives read only is not enough I have heard stories of them having to resort to using hot…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to Enabled/Disable Outlook 2010 Social Connector (a.k.a. People Pane)

There is an awesome new feature coming in Outlook 2010 call the Outlook Social Connector (a.k.a. People Pane) that allows you to view all the recent relevant status updates and emails from that person. This feature also enables third parties (i.e. Facebook, Twitter & Linkedin) to make connectors so that the view can contain information from a variety of sources….

Continue Reading...
Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to make USB drives read only on Windows XP

One of the great new features with Windows 7 was Bitlocker to Go that enabled IT Administrators to ensure that all data written to USB drives is encrypted. In conjunction with this new feature Microsoft also added another option called “Deny write access to removable drives not protected by BitLocker” which allowed user to still read the files off USB…

Continue Reading...