Introduction

Group Policy is a centralized administration tool for your domain joined systems. To summarize its capabilities, you can create policies in Active Directory, assign those policies to particular users or computers, and within those policies change any number of settings or configurations that are within the Windows operating system. The item inside Active Directory that contains these settings is called a Group Policy Object (GPO), so we will be focusing on the creation and manipulation of these in order to make some centralized management decisions that will affect large numbers of computers in our environment. GPOs can be utilized for user accounts, client computer settings, or for putting configurations onto your servers. Any domain joined system can be manipulated by a GPO; typically those settings put into place by GPOs cannot be overridden by the users, making them a very integral part of security for the companies that are familiar with making use of Group Policy regularly...