Windows Group Policy

Purpose

We use Group Policy to control the working environment of user accounts. It allows us to centrally manage all lab machines and user accounts.

Background

To use Group Policy, you create Group Policy Objects (GPOs). These can contain a mixture of Computer Configuration, and User Configuration.

Common uses of GPOs are:

• Manage registry-based policy with Administrative Templates
• Assigning scripts (login, startup,..etc)
• Software Deployment.

Group Policy objects are defined in a top down

By default, Microsoft Windows refreshes its policy settings every 90 minutes with a random 30 minutes offset. Domain Controllers refresh their policy every 5 minutes. Users can also used the following command to force a Group Policy update.

gpupdate /force