CHAPTER 9Building Group Policies
For many years, making changes to computer or user environments was a time-consuming process. If you wanted to install a service pack or a piece of software, unless you had a third-party utility, you had to use the sneakernet (that is, you had to walk from one computer to another with a disk containing the software).
Installing any type of software or company-wide security change was one of the biggest challenges faced by system administrators. It was difficult enough just to deploy and manage workstations throughout the environment. Combine this with the fact that users were generally able to make system configuration changes to their own machines and it quickly became a management nightmare!
For example, consider the case of users who change system settings. Relatively minor changes, such as modifying TCP/IP bindings or Desktop settings, could cause hours of support headaches. Now multiply these (or other common) problems by hundreds (or even thousands) of end users. Clearly, system administrators needed to have a secure way to limit the options available to users of client operating systems.
How do you prevent problems such as these from occurring in a Windows Server 2025 environment? Fortunately, there’s a readily available solution delivered with the base operating system that’s easy to implement. Two of the most important system administration features in Windows Server 2025 and Active Directory are Group Policy and Security Policy. By ...
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