Windows Group Policy Administrator's Pocket Consultant, by William Stanek

Reviewed by Mitch Tulloch, lead author of the Windows Vista Resource Kit

Windows Group Policy Administrator's Pocket Consultant provides concise, valuable guidance for administrators who need to implement, manage, and maintain Group Policy in enterprise environments. As in Stanek's other Administrator's Pocket Consultant titles, the writing style is clear and direct, the content accurate, and the organization easy to follow.

Part I, "Implementing Group Policy," includes two chapters. Chapter 1, "Introducing Group Policy," helps you understand both domain and local Group Policy and introduces the tools used for managing policy. Chapter 2, "Deploying Group Policy," describes Group Policy enhancements in the Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems, explains the difference between policy settings and preferences, and shows how to apply and link policy objects to Active Directory objects.


Part II, "Managing Group Policy," has three chapters. Chapter 3, "Group Policy Management," provides step-by-step guidance for performing common administration tasks using the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) and the Group Policy Management Editor. Chapter 4, "Advanced Group Policy Management," examines Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM), a benefit for volume-licensed Software Assurance (SA) customers, which provides a set of extensions for the GPMC that increase the power and flexibility of policy management by implementing change control, Group Policy Object (GPO) templates, and enhanced delegation. Chapter 5, "Searching and Filtering Group Policy," shows you how to quickly search for GPOs, filter for policy settings, and use security filtering and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) filters to fine-tune policy processing.

Part III, "Maintaining and Recovering Group Policy," includes three chapters that help you fine-tune your Group Policy environment and quickly recover from a disaster. Chapter 6, "Maintaining and Migrating the SYSVOL," provides step-by-step guidance on how to implement Distributed File System (DFS) replication of the SYSVOL throughout a domain for more efficient replication of policy data. The chapter also outlines several other procedures you can implement to maintain your SYSVOL, including how to generate health reports and perform propagation tests. Chapter 7, "Managing Group Policy Processing," shows how to modify policy processing by changing how inheritance works, implementing loopback processing, modifying the refresh interval, and configuring slow-link detection. Part III concludes with Chapter 8, "Maintaining and Restoring Group Policy," which has detailed instructions on how to back up and restore policy objects and other settings.

The book concludes with an appendix, "Installing Group Policy Extensions and Tools," that shows you how to install the client and server components of AGPM on different Windows platforms.

Windows Group Policy Administrator's Pocket Consultant is a book that every enterprise administrator will want to have handy on the bookshelf. I had the privilege of working with Stanek as the technical reviewer for this title, and was impressed with the quality and quantity of valuable information the book provides.