Documenting Group Policy

[tri_94]

Hi there everyone

 

Wondering if anyone can help with the best way of documenting all the details in group policy. Ideally would like to export to excel with all the details from a group policy inculding things like logon / startup scripts.

 

Any help would be great.

 

Many Thanks

[Fazza]

If you right-click on a group policy you can export all the setting in it in to a html file if that's any help?

[DaveTheTech]

We recently went through an large job of exporting our group poliies and importing them into another domain.

I couldnt find an easy way of doing this - at least not for free. There was one tool, but they wanted a lot of money.

 

I went through and recreated the polcies in a lab. Moving and merging them so that all the settings were where I wanted them.

 

This meant that the title of the GPO was enough. Theres staff, pupil and technician policies. Computer ones ended up being broken down to specific tasks. Power settings for example.

There is a description field in the policy.

[Chaniel]

I'd recommend using AGPM (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-desktop-optimization-pack/agpm/) if you have access. Change control, versioning, backup and restore and an approval workflow. Bit overkill for some environments but nice in others.

 

History/changelog is the best part imo.

 

Without that, I'd add comments to the GPO as I edit them (in the description/comments field) with reasons of why they were added etc. Exporting GPOs as HTML as a backup is nice in the event of a disaster or replication failure.

[tri_94]

Thanks for your reply. I have all the information in exports in both xml and html. I would of liked the information into excel to be able to anotate etc.

[jthompson]

GPOs have version numbers in them that increment whenever changes are made. If you're exporting copies of your policies somehow, perhaps make a note of the version numbers each time, too.