Posted in Setting of the Week

Group Policy Setting of the Week 22 – Configure Background Sync (offline files)

This weeks setting of the week is second is another one of the new Windows 7 offline file settings called “Configure Background Sync” which can be found under Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Networks > Offline Files.  This setting allows you to configured the new Windows 7 feature that background sync’s offline file when a computer is…

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Posted in Site News

I’m a Microsoft MVP!!!

Yesterday I was absolutely thrilled to find out that I was awarded a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. This is truly a fantastic honour to be recognised for all my contributions to the Group Policy community both on this online and at speaking engagements. This is certainly my most treasured professional achievement that I have ever received and has certainly given…

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Posted in Setting of the Week

Group Policy Setting of the Week 20 – Exclude File form being cached

This weeks setting is a new configuration setting in Offline Files called “Exclude files form being cached”. This setting can be used by IT administrators to block any un-wanted file types from being made available for offline use. You can find this setting under Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Network > Office Files and it will only…

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Posted in Tutorials

How to prevent x86 (32bit) applications installing via Group Policy on Windows x64

One of the powerful feature of Group Policy that have been around since its inception has been the ability to deploy and manage MSI based applications. Once senario you might find yourself in due to increasing popularity of Windows x64 is how do you deploy the right version of an application to your SOE however you are still running a…

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Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to black/white list wireless networks in Vista & Windows 7

I have seen an number of posts form IT Administrators on the Microsoft Group Policy forums asking how prevent their users from connecting to a wireless network. Maybe it is because they have an open WIFI network on the floor above that users keep connecting to so they can by pass the proxy server URL restrictions or they don’t want…

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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…

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Posted in Site News

Site outage

Looks like this site was down for most of the day… Argh…  I have logged a job with DreamHost and now the site seems to be working… hm… Seems to be ok now but feel free to ping me at @alanburchill if you have any issues with accessing the site.

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Posted in News Site News

Tweet now for more Windows 7 Libraries Group Policies @gpteam

One of the features in Windows 7 that is sadly lacking are any Group Policies that can be used to configure an IT administrator to configure is the Libraries feature. Well an article on the Bink.nu web has started a wish list for new features to be include with Service Pack 1 and one is the ability to configured libraries…

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