10 things GPPs can do better than your script!

[PiqueABoo]

One of the screen shots is wrong (power), but this is a nice little summary and one hadn't crossed my mind at all i.e. local admin password changing:

10 things GPPs can do better than your script!

[kmount]

Good find, very useful.

[leco]

Not really got to grips with Preferences, yet. But I'll squirrel this away for future use. Many thanks

[DaveP]

Already using bits of the preferences settings indicated here but it is good to get hands on a guide which, at first sight, lays out clearly some of what is involved and what some of our options are. Thanks.

[Soulfish]

Very useful - cheers

[rh91uk]

This is excellent - thanks :-)

[Simcfc73]

Hurrah for the default printer button.

[AngryTechnician]

I have to say I'm eager to see if they've improved the performance of GPPs on Windows 7. I've been using them since shortly after Vista came out, and while they are incredibly useful, in practice some of the functionality is really flaky.

[Gatt]

Has anyone had any success with mapping printers via GPO?

[AngryTechnician]

Has anyone had any success with mapping printers via GPO?

That's one bit that does work, though I've had some trouble with HP printer drivers when using it (not with any other manufacturer though, and I'm pretty sure it's specific to an HP driver bug on Vista/7).

The key is to make sure you ALWAYS tick the box on the Common tab to run the preference setting in the user's security context. You'd think this would be the default for a user preference, but it's not!

[Gatt]

The mapped drives work a treat too - use it to map and rename home folders depending on group membership

[PiqueABoo]

in practice some of the functionality is really flaky

You mention it not working for nested groups - that works fine for me for several things (including those drive mappings) with the XP CSE. Example: User A in Group B. Group B in Group C. Drive mapping preference targeted at Group C => works.

[AngryTechnician]

You mention it not working for nested groups - that works fine for me for several things (including those drive mappings) with the XP CSE. Example: User A in Group B. Group B in Group C. Drive mapping preference targeted at Group C => works.

Very interesting. I'm trying to remember exactly which type of preference I tried this on when it didn't work. I think it was a computer-targeted preferences rather than user-targeted, and that may make the difference here (even though it shouldn't). Unfortunately I can't check since I've changed jobs since writing that article and am not yet using GPP very much in my new job. Will have a tinker next week and see if I can find the exact thing that wasn't working.

[PiqueABoo]

There is definitely something that doesn't work consistently for me - copying and pasting a bunch of preferences from one GPO to another. Haven't pinned down the precise circumstances, but roughly 10% of the time the copied prefs haven't worked (until I recreated them from scratch).

And another thing although it is a fairly special requirement:

I can export GPOs from one domain and import them on another via GPMC. To make settings that refer to security principals (and so on) work, you create a migration table that maps references to say Domain Admins @ Source Domain to Domain Admins @ Target Domain.

This migration is fine for standard registry policy, but has no effect on preferences. So before importing GPOs with preferences I have scripts run around grabbing the relevant names and SIDs, then use those for text search and replaces in the various XML files where preferences are stored.

[john]

Must admit mine worked great for about 3 days but my drive mapping seems to have stopped :S need to investigate more though that a job for tomorrow....