Microsoft® Windows® Group Policy Guide

Testing GPOs Before Deployment

Whether you have been running Active Directory for a long time or are just deploying Active Directory in your enterprise, you must consider the effects of GPOs within the organization. We have spent the majority of this chapter talking about what to consider and have outlined some best practices for Group Policy design and deployment.

Before you deploy any Group Policy settings to production computers, you must develop a strategy to test the settings to ensure that they produce the desired results. Ideally, you should have a test environment that closely resembles your production environment—including domain controllers, domain members, operating systems, resource servers, network bandwidth, and so forth. You use ...