Group Policy Comments

Group Policy comments have great potential. I don't seem them used too frequently. This is unfortunate as they can be a simple way to document your GPOs so that you can quickly determine what the intent of a given bag of configuration settings may be.

The life-cycle of a Group Policy Object is not something that has received a lot of attention over the years. Microsoft's Advanced Group Policy Management is great, but not widely used and doesn't cover some key life-cycle needs. There are some tools out there to help in that area and at SDM Software you can find a couple of very nice solutions to common configuration issues. Take a look at Group Policy Compliance Manager and Group Policy Auditing and Attestation when you get a chance.

But, out of the box, comments are great and it may be helpful to take a few minutes to check them out. I recorded a bit of a stream of conscious discussion, with myself, on Group Policy comments. Take a look. If you have ideas of other topics around configuration, Group Policy, PowerShell and more, let me know. I'm happy to drill into different areas that may be helpful to folks.

Enjoy! 

Kevin

Clean up my Azure space

Starting a new job can be filled with rebuilding labs, cleaning up old configurations, essentially building up tech so that you can start from scratch.

There are so many benefits to being a Microsoft Alumni that I was simply not paying attention to. One of those it 50% off MSDN subscription (new subscription). That is amazing. I began my MSDN Pro subscription last week. With that level there are $150 a month worth of Azure services! This is great for testing.

I had used Azure quite a bit for different things while at Specops and my liveID was associated with the company. I had done a lot of configuration up there before and I wanted to clean up... get rid of VMs, Networks, essentially wipe and re-load... but no... not really.

The Directory Services I created for labs while at Specops (SullyCo and Speocps Product Services) are apparently there to stay. They most likely won't interfere with anything (but they could) but it is annoying to see artifacts in there that you won't ever use...

It also took me a while to actually figure out this was not possible, after trying many things... finally found the threads and discussions online about this.

Simply for regulatory reasons there should be a way to remove the Directory Services when they are deprecated. If anyone is aware of a way to do this, please let me know.

Kevin

Copy-VMFile and more

I'm setting up some labs and wanted to capture a few things. Here is a walk through of how to copy files from you Hyper-V host to Guest VMs. I touch on a few items that are a bit tricky and try to highlight some good techniques in using the amazing PowerShell.

Enjoy the video and let me know if more topics like this would be interesting or helpful.

Kevin

Old Friends, New Beginnings

I am so excited to have the opportunity to join my old friend, cohort in all things Group Policy and general good guy, Darren Mar-Elia. Darren has asked me to join his team to continue to deliver great solutions to the world. We are both passionate about the past, present and future of configuration management and configuration technologies in general.

It is an exciting time. Check us out at http://www.sdmsoftware.com and follow Darren (@grouppolicyguy) and me (@kevsully67) on twitter.

I'll begin to use this space as a general purpose, scratch-pad of sorts. I will also start blogging on the GPOGuy blog and be delivering some webinar content in the areas of configuration, powershell, Group Policy, DSC and more and more.

Find SDM Software on youtube, Facebook and wherever you wander. We'll try to be there.

Kevin