Troubleshooting Group Policy with a Little Help From a Friend

A little-noted fact of life in the Windows administrator's world is that in spite of the next shiny thing that attracts his or her manager's attention, the admin still has to keep the wheels of IT rolling along with not-so-sexy technology.

Such as, well, Group Policy.

Perhaps it's an indicator of a new law of technology: the one that says, "The greater its importance to the successful running of everyday IT, the greater the mysteriousness of the technology, and the greater its troubleshooter's frustration when it doesn't work the way he or she wants."

Enter Group Policy expert Darren Mar-Elia's company, SDM Software.Having toiled in the dusty fields of Group Policy for many years, Mar-Elia has learned a thing or two and applied it to his company's Group Policy solutions.

For example, recently SDM Software announced GPO Reporting Pak 2.0, composed of the GPO Compare and GPO Exporter products. GPO Reporting Pak 2.0 offers visibility into Group Policy Deployments and lets you quickly find redundant and conflicting policy settings. You can also search and report on Group Policy across your environment.

Below is a screenshot from a report from SDM Software's Exporter solution:

SDM Software GP Exporter

SDM Software will be at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) next week, showing demos of its award-winning Group Policy Automation Engine, the only solution for automating the management of Group Policy. 

“With customers whose environments range from 25 to 10,000 GPOs, the Automation Engine and Reporting Pak provide industry-leading Group Policy expertise to customers with complex GPO deployments,” Mar-Elia says.

Check out Mar-Elia's Group Policy blog at the SDM Software site.

For more information about SDM Software solutions, visit the SDM Software site.