What this book covers

Chapter 1, Group Policy - The Basics, gets us comfortable with the different types of Group Policy and creates an understanding as to how it works. We will also use this time to build a test lab that will be used throughout the book.

Chapter 2, Group Policy Management Console (GPMC), explores the primary interface for interacting with Group Policy and all of its associated settings.

Chapter 3, Daily Tasks in Group Policy, tackles many of the commonplace items that you, as a Group Policy administrator, would need to accomplish on a daily basis.

Chapter 4, Advanced Filtering of Group Policy Objects, dives deeper into GPMC to explain the different ways that Group Policy settings can be filtered so that they only apply to users, workstations, or servers of your choosing.

Chapter 5, Deploying Policy Settings, takes us into the Group Policy Editor, where we begin crafting GPOs into usable objects inside our domain. Here, we learn how to start making real changes to our workstations by deploying policy packages to them.

Chapter 6, Group Policy Preferences, showcases the differences between policies and preferences, and spends time working with the settings available on the preferences side of the house.

Chapter 7, Group Policy as a Security Mechanism, portrays numerous ways that Group Policy can be used to enhance your overall security strategy. Security is possibly the greatest benefit of all the services offered by Group Policy.

Chapter 8, Group Policy Maintenance, gets into the less exciting, but need-to-know tasks associated with maintaining your Group Policy environment and ensuring that it runs well for years to come.

Chapter 9, Group Policy Troubleshooting, helps guide the troubleshooting process whenever diagnosing an issue inside Group Policy. Most troubleshooting involves hunting down improper links or filters, but there is also potential for some under-the-hood issues.

Chapter 10, PowerShell for Group Policy Administration, takes what we know about Group Policy and shows us how to accomplish it via PowerShell. This helps to automate tasks, and allows interaction with Group Policy strictly from a command-line interface.