Group Policy Improvements in Vista
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Every once in a while, when a new operating system hits the market, computer professionals anxiously check out the change logs, test drive the new utilities, and do their best to locate and understand the latest updates. Windows Vista has brought a large pack of additions and improvements to the way the system can be managed. In this article we’ll discuss Vista’s Group Policy improvements.
As always, we're going to focus on the basics first, describing how the group policy works. After we've grown familiar with the group policy terminology, we will be ready to go further, and see the new improvements and fixes that Vista brought with its launch.
Microsoft introduced the technology of Group Policies with the very first Windows NT release. At the heart of these policies there stands at least one GPO (Group Policy Object). This GPO holds the collection of policies, which are templates, settings, and configuration options that apply to registries, NTFS security, audit security, software installation, folder redirection, logon/logoff scripts, IE options, etc.
Basically, the system administrator is able to enforce these policies to a specific GPO. This means that all of the computers, users, and objects of any kind (such as printers) will behave the same way. The most common scenario is the one with logon scripts or remote software installations. Objects must be present only once in the Active Directory (duplicates aren't allowed), but can fall into more than one GPO, too.
Moreover, the GPOs are stored along with their policies on the Active Directory Domain Controller in the case of domains. This way the policies are enforced each time a computer joins the domain. With local computers that aren't in a domain, the local group policy editor is really minimalist, since it is limited compared to AD's GPOs.
Throughout this article we will focus on group policies that are linked to an Active Directory container. This is where the largest number of improvements were wrought; approximately 800 new policies and templates were included, and now their total count has reached 2495. We're going to point out the major changes as well. Turn the page!
Next: Major Improvements >>
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