Active Directory Administration Cookbook

Getting the Most Out of Group Policy

Group Policy allows administrators to manage one device, but also many thousands of devices and/or servers through a centralized management console. You can use it not only to secure domain-joined devices and make them more useful for end users, but also to make them look and feel identical as per your organization's standards. Of course, granularity in Group Policy objects offers the ability to just manage these settings for devices in an Active Directory domain, as for the Active Directory site (but please don't!) or per Organizational Unit (OU), and beyond that using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) filters.

Group Policy has been around since the beginning of Active Directory in Windows 2000 ...