Group Policy Preferences

Over the years I have worked with Group Policy in many different ways. My experience ranges from helping an enterprise client establish a brand new set of policies for physical PCs and VDI machines to authoring ADM/ADMX/ADML files. Last year I presented and wrote a very detailed analysis of the impact of Group Policy on user logon performance (blog posts). Along the way I learned a lot about the strengths but also about the weaknesses of Group Policy. This article is an account of the latter.

This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the third in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Citrix XenApp 7.6 in a steady state. Please start reading with the first article.

This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the second in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Citrix XenApp 7.6 in a steady state. Please start reading with the first article.

If you want to disable the BitLocker service via Group Policy Preferences, you will find that you cannot. The service’s startup mode stays at “manual” and the following event is logged to the application event log:

I confess: I like group policies. They are and have always been a great way of managing computer and user settings ever since their conception and introduction with Windows 2000. Of course, at the beginning management tools were nonexistent. But we were so happy not to have to rely on NT4’s system policies any more that we did not even notice. Then came GPMC, and life started to become truly great. RSOP! Group Policy modelling! Those are great tools for every admin!