GPOAdmin question

[Kurt Buff]

All,

Anyone here using the Quest GPOAdmin product?

I'm about to trial it, and they have several different ways to configure it - ADLDS, SQL, AD.

If you have experience with it, especially installing it, which did you choose, and did it work well for you?

Thanks,

Kurt

[Markus Klocker]

Hi Kurt,

we use AGPM and are basically more or less glad with it so no real help for you.
What are the key needs from your perspective?
I'm asking because the the support of AGPM seems to be going away and no replacement seem to be offered by Microsoft.

Best,
    Markus

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[Kurt Buff]

We haven't implemented AGPM, so wanted a good management platform for the GPOs - and GPOAdmin seems to do a lot of good things, like an approval process, versioning, quick reversion, and especially giveing comparisons for conflicting and duplicate settings in the GPOs.

That last is the biggest reason for getting it in here. We don't have that many GPOs (fewer than 200), but some of them are very big and contain lots of settings, and it's been a major pain to work with them. I want to break them apart into more manageable chunks - particularly to break apart the User and Computer configurations into separate GPOs, and

I'm hoping it can deal with the Extra Registry Settings found in a lot of our GPOs - either turn them into Preferences or let me edit them in some other way, but I'm not counting on that.

Kurt

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[Michael B. Smith]

I’ve always used Darren’s stuff. So I can’t make a good comparison to other software, but if you want to be able to slice and dice your GPOs like Ginsu knives (showing my age here) you really can’t go wrong with https://sdmsoftware.com/.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ntsysadmin/CADy1Ce7%2BZ8QDqACugTjv9zGngiR-1C6VKMGsxc81NRrj7oSJiw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Kurt Buff]

We looked at their offering a year or two ago. They gave a very lackluster demo, and the sysadmins weren't impressed by it, so we passed on it.

We did a demo on the Quest offering back then as well, but I couldn't find the time to do the trial, couldn't get management interested in it.

Now that I've demonstrated the shortcomings of our GPO infrastructure, we revisited it, and the Quest did another demo, and the sysadmins liked it again, so I'm making time to do the trial this time to see if we really want it. If it doesn't do what we want, I'll definitely point to Darren's offering.

Kurt

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[Markus Klocker]

The deduplication is for sure nice.

My cents on this when you are way over 1000 gpos the goal is to restore.
We had minor changes that had a major impact so no generalization here.
I just want to make sure the real reason why to use that stuff might be a different outcome.

Just keep in mind that things can go sideways (normally de do and if your not fit to get back...) and that's where problems start.

All in all better be safe then sorry and that's where AGPM helped for us.

Best,
    Markus

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[Andrea 'ML' Suatoni]

Extra Registry Settings are there because the .adm/.admx files dealing with them have been removed from the centralized policy definitions store. For instance, it’s quite normal if you have switched over the years through different versions of Windows and you still have some of those old policy settings defined in your GPOs.

 

If you only want to get rid of the ERS, then this article tells you how to do it, and you don’t need any additional tool:

 

https://sdmsoftware.com/tips-tricks/removing-extra-registry-settings-from-gpos/

 

Andrea

 

From: ntsys...@googlegroups.com <ntsys...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Kurt Buff
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2022 8:49 PM
To: ntsys...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [ntsysadmin] GPOAdmin question

 

We haven't implemented AGPM, so wanted a good management platform for the GPOs - and GPOAdmin seems to do a lot of good things, like an approval process, versioning, quick reversion, and especially giveing comparisons for conflicting and duplicate settings in the GPOs.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ntsysadmin/CADy1Ce7%2BZ8QDqACugTjv9zGngiR-1C6VKMGsxc81NRrj7oSJiw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Kurt Buff]

I was aware of the cause, but I searched for hours trying to find how to remove those entries, so thank you very much for that article.

Kurt

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ntsysadmin/AM6PR01MB5880C0430A5B8686B72A08F0C4179%40AM6PR01MB5880.eurprd01.prod.exchangelabs.com.

[brett...@hotmail.com]

Sorry for the slight tangent... Markus, do you have pointers on where to even download AGPM? I'm struggling to locate how to get the bits I'm entitled to run :(  And yes I know it's a dead end product (which is a pity; when I was a MSFT employee it was often touted as the unsung hero app for orgs) but the versioning would be a quick win for me

[Markus Klocker]

If you are licensed it should be available under VLSC.
It's a part of MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack).

hth
    Markus

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