These Starter GPO’s are recommended settings for Windows XP and Windows Vista. It contains Settings for “Specialized Security— Limited Functionality (SSLF)” and “Enterprise Client (EC)”.

Of course you need RSAT to manage these Starter GPO’s

Download them here

They are now here for XP, Server 2003 and Vista

Download:

Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows XP (KB943729)
Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows XP x64 Edition (KB943729)
Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows Vista (KB943729)
Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows Vista x64 Edition (KB943729)
Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows Server 2003 (KB943729)
Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB943729)

This file contains all Group Policy settings since Windows 2000 so this is the only file you need. For Windows Server 2008 24 new settings are available where 12 of them are for Terminal Services functionallity.

This reference file is also for the new admx/adml-format so to know for sure you can use settings described in this file you need to start using Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 to configure your GPO’s.

Download the new reference file here (xls and xlsx file available)

Even if it’s only Tuesday this must be selected as funniest this week.

Opening the Windows Vista box

I still can’t understand what they where thinking about when they wrote this!

At first I wasn’t sure why but then I could see that this package also includes all language files for the admx-files which will make it easier if you have people in different countries all creating GPO’s and they want to create them in their own language. So it’s much easier way to collect the adml-files rater than needing to install different Vista’s just to get the adml-files.

Download the files from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=05d0598b-95f9-4bdd-af36-b365d68ec5f6&DisplayLang=en

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

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008: These has it as default that you can configure wireless policys using GPO so nothing needs to be done.

Windows 2003: Depending on which level of servicepack you have installed you might need to install “Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) support for Wireless Network (IEEE 802.11) Policies is available for Windows Server 2003″. Note that this will not let you configure WPA2 wireless policys. You will need Windows Vista och Windows Server 2008 for that.

Windows XP: First requirement is that you need to have Windows Server 2003 AD Schema in your AD. Second requirement is that you need atleast SP1 for XP.
From you Windows 2003 server (located at C:\Windows\System32) copy the files wlsnp.dll, wlstore.dll and ws03res.dll. Then register wlsnp.dll using “regsvr32 wlsnp.dll”.
Now this has registrered a new snap-in for Wireless Network Policy.
Side-note: For Windows XP to be able to process WPA2 policys you will need to install “Update for Windows XP (KB917021)”

Windows 2000: Sorry, no can do…

Whenever you do any setting in a GPO you can add on a Comment in the new Comment page writing whatever you like. This is stored in the GPO so you will always have it for reference for further use later or any other purpose you might have.

These comments you write will of course print out on your reports created from GPMC, which I think is a very nice feature added.

Comments are stored at \\ad.domain.com\SYSVOL\ad.domain.com\policies\{GUID}\[MACHINE]/[USER]\comment.cmtx which is of course an XML file containing all your comments of settings in the GPO.

Using comments for your settings might make your life easier but remember that they wont show up if you are still using XP!

The tool is named GPLogView and it benefits from the new and improved logging for Group Policy in Windows Vista.

Read more about this to at the Group Policy Team Blog
Read about the monitor mode which I think is a nice feature.

Download the tool here.

Edit: This tool has also been released as an open source project so you may download the code from here if you need to alter the code for any reason.