Posted in Setting of the Week

Group Policy Setting of the Week 27 – Turn off numerical sorting in Windows Explorer

In this weeks setting I look at a new Windows 7 setting that reverts the sort order of folders back to the old way it would sort files and folder the same as Windows 2000 (and earlier). This policy setting is called “Turn off numerical sorting in Windows Explorer and can be found under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative…

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Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to apply a Group Policy Object to individual users or computer

Last week I showed you how to exclude an individual users from having a Group Policy Object (GPO) applied and this time I will show you how to properly apply a GPO to an individual user or computer. As I previously mentioned it is always best to use a security groups with GPO filtering even if you are only going…

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Posted in Setting of the Week

Group Policy Setting of the Week 26b – Do not allow Windows Messenger to be Run

(Wow… I have been doing this for 6 months now… how time flies… ) This weeks setting of the week is another old one however it is very important for any environment that is still running Windows XP SOE. The “Do not allow Windows Messenger to be run” will prevent any user from running Windows Messenger that comes out of…

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Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to exclude individual users or computers from a Group Policy Object

One of the common question I see on the forums from time to time is how to exclude a user and/or a computer from having a Group Policy Object (GPO) applied. This is a relatively straight forward process however I should stress this should be used sparingly and should always be done via group membership to avoid the administrative overhead…

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Posted in KB Focus

KB978098 Focus: Large “Folder Redirection” issue

Microsoft recently released KB978098 which explains an issues with folder redirection when using the Advanced folder redirection setting (see image below). The advanced setting of this policy is used when you want to redirect users to different locations based on security group location. This is a very helpful if you have a large number of users in the same site…

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Posted in Setting of the Week

Group Policy Setting of the Week 26 – Do not automatically make redirected folders available offline

This weeks setting is called “Do not automatically make redirected folders available offline and can be found under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > Folder Redirections and will work with Windows XP or later. As the name suggest this prevents any users redirected folder from being made available for offline use which is enabled by default….

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Posted in Setting of the Week

Group Policy Setting of the Week 25 – Remove the Action Center icon

The setting of the week is called “Remove the Action Center icon” and as the name says it  is used to remove the Action Center icon (a.k.a. Flag) from the system tray (see below). You might want to enable this setting if you are in a corporate environment and you centrally managed Backups, Firewall and Updates using other programs. However…

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Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to configure home page settings – Part 3

I know a lot of people have asked for this third an final instalment on how to use Group Policy to manage home page settings and so I have finally been able to find some time to finish this series of posts. Just to recap in Part 1 I showed you how to configure home page setting using the administrative…

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