Posted in Best Practice Security Tip

How to stop local administrators from bypassing Group Policy

Before I begin this article might be, for some of you, this will be well know information and it might all seem rather logical. But I continue to see questions being asked on forums as how as a Group Policy administrator can I prevent my users with local admin making a specific change or installing software/drivers on their own computer. The short answer is you…

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Posted in Best Practice

“What group policy settings should I configure?”

Having been a Group Policy MVP for a while and a contributor to the Microsoft Group Policy forums for even longer I still see a lot of people asking “I am new to Group Policy. What settings should I configure?”. My answer to these people is now pretty much unconditionally “nothing”. That’s right… Nothing…. Of course that is not the…

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Posted in Best Practice hotfix Tip

Disappearing Folder Redirection Issues with Windows 7

Thanks to a tip off from fellow MVP Darren Mar-Elia about fairly common issues with Folder Redirection in Windows 7. In short there is a pretty significant issue in Folder Redirection if configured incorrectly that could result in a loss of data for users. There is a mitigation of this issues however this is broken in Windows 7 Service Pack…

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Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

Group Policy for Virtual Desktops Infrastructure (VDI)

Remote Desktop Virtualisation is a feature of Windows that allows your users to run windows running remotely from server hardware. This is almost an identical concept with how Terminal Services (a.k.a. Remote Desktop Services, a.k.a. Remote Desktop Session Host) works where the users is sending keyboard and mouse messaged to the server and then receives the screen updates back. It…

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Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

Configuring a Software Library for Group Policy Software Deployment

This article is a continuation of the other blog post I have previously published at Best Practice: How to deploy software using Group Policy. I highly recommend that you take to the time to review the other blog posting before continuing on reading this post. Most particularly if you are looking at using Group Policy to deploy software please review…

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Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to reset a Roaming Profile in Windows 7

If you have are one of the many people who have checked out my Best Practice: Roaming Profiles and Folder Redirection (a.k.a. User State Virtualization) post you probably know that roaming profiles can be super useful feature to implement. However over the years roaming profiles have got a bit of a bad wrap as sometime things can and do go…

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Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

Group Policy for WSUS

Windows Server Update Service (a.k.a. WSUS) is Microsoft free tool they provide for deploying patches and updates. In my experience this tool is pretty much used by every organisation in the world that has more than a hand full of computers. WSUS is also a requirement for the Software Update option in SCCM 2007. What I hope this post will…

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Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to deploy Software using Group Policy

Originally this was just going to be a post showing you how to deploy the Windows InTune client to a computer using Group Policy however it turned out I think this article would be best suited to show you how to use some advanced techniques to deploy software via Group Policy. So even if you don’t want to specifically  deploy…

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