In this article I am going to talk about how you can use Group Policy to control the firewall that comes out of the box with Windows but first I want to give you a bit of history of the evolution of host based firewall in Windows. Firewalls have long been around for year protecting internal corporate networks from outside…

This weeks setting is one that has just been mentioned in the AD Blogs Friday mail sack and until today was a setting/feature of Windows Vista/7 that I didn’t know existed. This setting display information about previous logons during a user logon and is very similar to the last logon screen I see when logging onto an online banking web…

During Kevin Sullivan Group Policy session at TechEd 2010 in the USA this year he mentioned an example of a being able to configure group policy to allow users to select whatever screensaver they want except the one called “(None)” (see image below). While this method does not prevent the users from select the (None) from the screensaver options list…

The beta of Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 beta has now been released to the public for testing. For your benefit I have parsed through the complete list of hotfixes and I have listed out all the group policy specific setting. If you just want the service pack right now you can download it here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ff183870.aspx I have…

This is another article I have written that address’s the commonly asked question on the Group Policy forum as to how you can use group policy to block or allow users to specific web site URL’s. It goes without saying that the most effective way to implement content filtering for the internet is to maintain list of sites on your…

Jeremy Moskowitz (fellow Group Policy MVP) has just appeared in an interview with Matt Hester on Bytes by TechNet web site. They covered how IT Professionals start with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, why they need to know about Group Policy and what is new with Group Policy in Windows 7. Jeremy also highlighted some tips for his…

The setting of the week this week prevents users from running Windows Media Center on Vista or above versions. Unlike Windows XP which had its own dedicated version of Media Center, Vista Enterprise and Ultimate editions and Windows 7 Business, Enterprise and Ultimate had inbuilt support Windows Media Center. This setting would most likely be used in a corporate environment…

This year Microsoft are now making available for everyone the videos screen cast from the TechEd USA conference on the TechEd web site. So if you attended TechEd USA this year but didn’t get to see all the sessions or if you just missed out on going all together you can now check out all the session at http://www.msteched.com For…