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Hello, I have a number of machines that I am going to upgrade to IE8 from IE6. My question is - If i import the adm file for IE8 into GPMC before ive upgraded all of the stations, will this new adm still control the settings for IE6? (Homepage proxy etc etc.)

Recently I was installing the ClickView Player trial for one of my schools and was struck by the lack of centralized configuration for the player software. In fairness there is really only one required setting which is the server which you can easily initially setup by adding an A record to DNS pointing "clickview" to the appropriate IP address. Their advice was simply to change the server name then change it back which is fine if you have nothing else on it. Also this method does not account for changing the server and as the installer does not clean up its registry keys on uninstall a redeploy is out of the question. After fighting with the MSI to try and make a transform I decided that it would be much simpler to make an ADM/ADMX template to specify it. This also make changing the server trivial. As this key is not in the managed area of the registry you must remove filtering for it to show on older Windows XP/2003 setups. To do this go to the view menu and click filtering, then untick "Only show policy setting that can be fully managed" As the key is part of the machine registry hive the setting is simply under a ClickView folder under Administrative Templates inside computer configuration. You just need to specify the server in the same policy that you use to push the software and it all works. ClickView.zip

Hi guys we are running office 2010 on CC3 Workstations with windows 2003 servers We have the ADM that comes from RM to allow basic office 2010 setting to be changed but we would like to change others mainly the Autosave feature etc. We have download the adm file from MS and tried adding to the type manager but theydo not appear in managment console. Has anyone got all the adm fiel working on CC3 for office 2010 if so how or if you know how i should do it then please help we have never done importing adm file before for cc3 but the RM ADM office 2010 is a bit thin on the ground. THanks in advance Stuart

I've created a Group Poilcy ADM Template to configure the rip music options for Windows Media Player centrally. The idea is the teachers around the school will rip CDs as they get them and they'll be available to every classroom. Previous to this, if teachers ripped music, it was stored as protected .wma files inside their own My Documents folder. Creating a central CD server for Windows Media Player Feedback appreciated.

Hello Everyone, As most of you are aware Windows 10 is a massive pain to lock down properly. There are countless missing group policy settings that would be useful to have, that Microsoft could implement. Also I noticed that some of the group policy settings haven't been updated to work properly with windows 8 & 10. For example, this policy 'User Config > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components/File Explorer and set the 'Do not allow Folder Options to be opened from the Options buttons on the View tab of the ribbon' will successfully disable the Folder Options box but users will have full access to enable or disable 'Item check boxes' 'File name extensions' Hidden items' and 'Hide selected items' via the View tab on the Ribbon UI. The main reason why I wanted to disable access to folder options was to prevent users from being able to change these options, yet that policy will allow users to show/hide them via the view tab. It's crazy! I came across this post that explains how to 'grey out' anything on the ribbon UI: Server 2012/Windows 8 – Ribbon UI: Disable Icons, Buttons, Shortcuts, Tasks, and Commands | Paper Street Online However this requires editing locked registry keys, great! Some of you may know that you cannot modify locked registry keys easily and you have to change the ownership of the keys to enable you to modify them. There is a exe tool that is mentioned here: Batch Script – Ribbon UI Customization: Take Ownership and Change Permissions of the CommandStore Subkeys in the Registry | Paper Street Online that enables you to unlock registry keys however I couldn't get it to work properly. In frustration I gave up and tried to come up with another solution to disable the show/hide section in the view tab. I remembered that ADM/ADMX (group policy files/templates) has full access to modify/edit the system and locked registry keys, So I decided to create my own custom adm template. After days of work and testing I have made a template that will disable (grey out) pretty much anything on the ribbon UI. Including the View > show/hide section YAY! Please be aware that this only greys out things in the ribbon UI. For example, say you disabled the delete button using my ADM template. It will not disable delete in any other way meaning the user could still right click and press delete or use any keyboard shortcuts to delete the file. So please bare this in mind. Always check group policy to see if there is an official way to disable something before using my ADM template as that is always the best way to go. As everyone's system is different and I can't test on all of your systems (obviously) I have to write this as a little disclaimer: I accept no responsibility for any loss or damage caused to the OS. Use at your own risk! Big Thanks to Paper Street Online for information on registry keys to edit/add: Server 2012/Windows 8 – Ribbon UI: Disable Icons, Buttons, Shortcuts, Tasks, and Commands | Paper Street Online Windows 8 & 10 Ribbon Customiser.zip

I just found this fantastic guide on creating ADM files to use for managing registry keys via group policy. I know that ADM is getting a little dated now with the uptake of Windows Server 2008 and ADMX. But this is still very useful for managing XP clients on a 2003 network an understanding how Group Policy actually works. It was posted to this blog just over a year ago: Florian’s Blog » How to create a custom ADM template? I have uploaded a copy of the PDF here as the download seemed a little slow from the blog and given the nasty habbit web sites have of dissapearing. There is additional Microsoft documentation here: Writing Custom ADM Files for System Policy Editor There is also a tool avalible to convert ADM templates to ADMX here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0F1EEC3D-10C4-4B5F-9625-97C2F731090C&displaylang=en howto_admTemplates.pdf