Microsoft® Windows® Group Policy Guide

Chapter 13. Group Policy Structure and Processing

In this chapter:
Navigating Group Policy Logical Structure
Navigating Group Policy Physical Structure
Navigating Group Policy Link Structure
Understanding Group Policy Processing
Navigating Local GPO Structure
Summary

To understand the structure of Group Policy, you first need to understand the structure of Active Directory^®. Active Directory has both physical and logical components. The heart of Active Directory’s physical architecture is an extensible storage engine (ESE) for reading and writing information to the Active Directory data store. The ESE uses an object-based hierarchy to represent information in the data store. The data store is essentially a database with a primary data file, working files ...