Another new feature of Group Policy in Windows 8.1 is the ability for it to now cache Group Policy to improve performance when processing synchronous policy settings. Now before you say Windows 8 already starts REALLY FAST how can this make it any faster, this caching only really kicks in some very specific fringe cases. Specifically it improves performance when…

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…

As I mentioned in my previous blog post there is a new Group Policy setting called “Redirect folders on primary computers only”. As the descriptions says this ”policy setting is useful to improve logon performance and to increase security for user data on computers where the user might not want to download private data, such as on a meeting room…

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…

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…

Microsoft has just released a new hotfix to address an issue with slow logon performance when you use AppData folder redirection. Consider the following scenario in a network environment: You configure users to use roaming profiles to log on to a client computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. You redirect the %AppData%\Roaming folder to a…

Welcome… The Group Policy Center is a web site I have made to publish all the tip’s, tricks and how-to’s that I have learnt over years using Group Policy. I hope that you find this web site valuable for all your Group Policy needs. Feedback (good and bad), question’s and comments are most welcome on the site… For your convenience…

In my previous article In this article Best Practice:Active Directory Structure Guidelines – Part 1 I spoke about some of the guidelines I personally use when developing an Active Directory OU structure. In this next part I will discuss some guidelines I use when designing a Group Policy Object infrastructure. Ideally you should make the the Active Directory OU and…