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Windows Vista SP1 removes GPMC

Sep 01

G JohanssonGPMC, GPO, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista GPMC, GPO, Windows 2008, Windows Vista 6 Comments

Maybe you have, or not, noticed that there has been as small discussion about GPMC in Windows Vista SP1 since the release of the “Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Beta White Paper“.

This is because in the white paper you can read the following: “Administrators requested features in Group Policy that simplify policy management. To do this, the service pack will uninstall the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) and GPEdit.msc will edit local Group Policy by default. In the SP1 timeframe, administrators can download an out-of-band release that will give them the ability to add comments to Group Policy Objects (GPOs) or individual settings and search for specific settings.”

This means that when you install SP1 you will no longer have GPMC installed on your computer and you should install the new enhanced edition of GPMC that will be available for download.

There is a small catch. If you install the SP1 now you will have GPMC removed and there is no GPMC-version available for download so then you need to: “Beta testers will find that after installing Windows Vista SP1, they no longer have access to GPMC, and that the new, enhanced version of GPMC has not yet been released. In this case, administrators can continue to edit Group Policy by opening a remote desktop session directly to the server or to a PC running the release to manufacturing (RTM) version of Windows Vista.” as written on Windows Vista Blog

They wrote about this on Betanews.com and on this site they have some parts completely wrong and instead of me writing about it you can read some parts from it on Darren Mar-Elia’s Blog which I find amusing.

In my personal mind I think it was the best to remove GPMC for a number of reasons since on most of the computers you wouldn’t need it, you can get very far using only gpedit.msc and rsop.msc and you should risk having users that could do own things with the tool, like for example create a backup of all your GPO’s etc.

Lets also hope the new enhanced version is as good as the existing one!

Download Windows Vista Service Pack 1 White paper