Chapter 9. Managing Group Policies
In chapter 8 you saw how to create Group Policy Objects (GPOs). In this chapter you’ll learn how to apply them to your environment to centrally manage user and computer configurations.
Tip
In the first section of this chapter you’ll learn how to link GPOs to AD sites, domains, and OUs. No one can ever remember which GPOs are linked where, so you’ll then learn how to discover the linkages. GPOs need to be removed once they’re no longer required. You can modify the way GPOs are processed by modifying the inheritance rules.
Modeling the policies that are applied to your users and computers when the multiple GPOs you’ve applied combine is a useful technique for troubleshooting and experimentation. The last section of the chapter shows you how to force the refresh of the application of GPOs to ensure the changes are active in your environment.
The chapter closes with a lab section that enables you to practice the skills you’ve learned in this chapter and chapter 8.
The act of applying a GPO is known technically as linking. You can link, or apply, GPOs to three types of places in your Active Directory:
1. The domain—the GPO is applied to all OUs in the domain
2. An OU—the GPO is applied to all child OUs