Welcome to the ITFreeTraining course on Group Policy. Group Policy is a powerful feature
that allows the administrator to have a lot of control over the Windows systems that they
support. This course is updated as required to meet the current exam objectives for the
Microsoft certification exams.
So to start this course off, let’s ask the question, what is Group Policy? Group Policy
allows the system administrator to have centralized control of users and computers on the network.
Settings can be configured like desktop settings, printers and login scripts just to mention
a few.
Group Policy works like this, an administrator, in this case, creates a group policy in Active
Directory. They can then configure just over 3 and a half thousand settings. These settings
can be targeted for users or computers. This includes desktop, laptops and servers. Once
the group policy is configured, it will be downloaded to the computer and applied.
The administrator also has the option to configure group policy settings and assign them to specific
users. Like with computers, the settings are configured and applied to the users. Any changes
to group policy settings stored in Active Directory will automatically be downloaded
to the computer and applied to the users and computers. You can see that the Group Policy
feature in Windows allows the administrator to have a lot of control over the user’s
experience. Now that we understand what Group Policy is, I will now have a closer look at
the history of Group Policy and how it works.
Group Policy was first introduced in Windows 2000. If you want to configure Windows, you
can do this using the registry; however, changes made to the registry are permanent. In contrast,
changes to group policy are not permanent and can be rolled back at any time. To remove
a change, the administrator would simply un-configure the group policy setting and Windows will
do the rest.
The next consideration with using the registry is that the registry can change. This is common
with new operating systems. If you control the user’s experience using the registry,
there is no guarantee that that same registry setting will work the same on a newer operating
system.
With group policy, changes in the operating system and new operating systems are supported.
Although group policy is updated, in most cases the group policy will work the same
on older operating systems and on newer operating systems. In some cases, you may need to configure
some additional settings to support newer operating systems because they have new features;
however, you should not have to change any existing settings. You can see the advantages
of Group Policy over traditional registry editing to configure computers in your organization.
With all this talk of centralized control, it may surprise you to hear that Group Policy
is in fact client driven. Group Policy settings are configured on clients by Client Side Extensions
or CSE’s. Which CSE’s are installed on the clients depends on which operating system
is running. Newer operating systems currently have 4 CSE’s. All Windows versions that
support Group Policy will have 3 CSE’s. If the 4th CSE’s is not shipped with the
operating system, Microsoft does have this CSE available to be downloaded and installed
for operating system after and including Windows XP.
Group Policy essentially works like this. Group Policy settings are stored on a Domain
Controller and replicated to all the other Domain Controllers. A client on the network
will download a copy of the Group Policies that apply to that client. These Group Policies
will then be processed by the Client Side Extension. If there is no Client Side Extension
or the Client Side Extension does not understand that setting, the setting will simply be ignored.
This allows you to configure Group Policy without having to worry about older clients
not being able to process the setting. Once you start learning about Group Policy, you
will find that it is a flexible system allowing backward compatibility as well a future development.
Well that covers it for the introduction to Group Policy. Remember this is only the first
video in the series on Group Policy. For the rest of the videos, please see our web page
or YouTube Channel. Until the next video, thanks for watching.