If you’re a Scriptlogic's Active Administrator customer, then you know its features are super handy! It has great Active Directory disaster recovery features, auditing for Active Directory, and excellent Group Policy Object management.
Scriptlogic’s Active Administrator, however, doesn’t add “super powers” to manage or lock down your desktops though.Active Administrator is about managing the contents of the Active Directory itself, and the management of objects inside it.
One of Scriptlogic’s Active Administrator functions helps with the creation, check-out, check-in and history of GPOs themselves. It handles the workflow and deployment of the Group Policy Objects themselves.
So, if you’ve already got Scriptlogic’s Active Administrator, and you want to lock down your applications (like we show in lots of our videos), PolicyPak just fits right in.
Watch this video (exclusively for Scriptlogic's Active Administrator owners) to see exactly how Active Administrator can add superpowers to GPOs with PolicyPak. You’ll see how Active Administrator is perfectly compatible with PolicyPak and you’ll get full change-control, reporting, history and rollback capabilities.
Click here for Video Transcript
So, if you’re invested in Active Administrator and committed to Group Policy as your way to lock down desktops, PolicyPak is the way you want to do it.
Remember, Active Administrator doesn’t add any more super-powers to your desktop. That’s okay.
That’s what PolicyPak is for. We have videos all over the website to show those superpowers off, like this one
So use:
- Active Administrator manage your Group Policy Objects overall
- Use PolicyPak to more securely manage your desktops and applications
PolicyPak was designed by Group Policy MVP Jeremy Moskowitz – who “wrote the book” on Group Policy, runs GPanswers.com, and lives and breathes Group Policy and enterprise software deployments and desktop lockdown.
In fact, PolicyPak’s founder, Jeremy Moskowitz also “guest blogs” on Scriptlogic’s website
Active Administrator from Scriptlogic is great to manage your GPOs overall. PolicyPak to manage your desktops and make Active Administrator even better.
When you’re ready to add the desktop superpowers you need (and then manage them using Group Policy) PolicyPak is here for you. And you can use Scriptlogic’s Active Administrator utility to manage it.
Click on Download or Webinar on the right to get PolicyPak and try it out for yourself.
PolicyPak works alongside Active Administrator Video Transcript
Hi, everybody. This is Jeremy Moskowitz, Group Policy MVP and Founder of PolicyPak Software. In this video, we’re going to see how PolicyPak works alongside ScriptLogic’s Active Administrator.
Active Administrator is a great utility. It helps organizations deal with their auditing of AD security, backup and recovery of AD objects and security in dealing with passwords. It also has a pretty robust GPO management section. To be super clear, this product doesn’t have any superpowers on the desktop. That’s not what this product’s job is. That’s not what Active Administrator does.
Active Administrator’s job, at least in the Group Policy section, is to do check-in/check-out and workflow management around Group Policy Objects. It deals with advanced Group Policy management features about the GPO itself, not about actually managing the desktop itself. So no superpowers on the desktop. If you’re using Group Policy to do that, the good news is that’s what PolicyPak does and we can integrate perfectly with the GPO management around Active Administrator.
Let’s go ahead and check out and see how that works. I’ll go ahead and create a “New” GPO in Active Administrator. I’ll call this “Manage Flash Player with Group Policy and PolicyPak.” It goes and creates that there. As we can see, the “Group Policy Management Editor” opens. We’ll just do what we do in our other PolicyPak demonstrations.
We’ll dive down under user side “PolicyPak/Applications/New/Application” and there it is, “PolicyPak for Flash Player.” We’ll make our configurations happen. You can watch how this actually affects the Flash client later. If you wanted to “Block all sites from using the camera and microphone”or you wanted to “Never check for updates” or things like that, you could certainly do that. That’s it as far as we’re concerned for that. We’ll go ahead and close that out. We’ve made some live changes right there.
Now when it comes to Active Administrator, it also has a full “GPO Repository” and “GPO History” and “GPO Modeling.” I’m not going to go into all that stuff, but let’s for fun if I decide I want to right click over this guy and I want to “Add to Offline Repository.”
What it’s doing now just to prove a point here is that we’re fully compatible with the repository that Active Administrator has, because PolicyPak is real, live Group Policy Objects. It’s not an add-on. It doesn’t have any kind of weird moving parts. It really is regular Group Policy.
If we go down under “GPO Repository” here and we want to “Manage Flash Player with Group Policy and PolicyPak,” we can do all the normal things. If you’re already an Active Administrator administrator, you know how this works. You would “Check Out.” You can see a little check out there. We can “Edit GPO Offline” here.
We can make some additional of different changes if we want to here. We’ll go ahead and we’ll add this change. We’ll go ahead and uncheck that if we want to. That’s totally fine. We’re making some changes. That’s great.
Now that we’ve done that, we can “Check In – Apply Changes.” Let’s go ahead and do that here. Alright, that’s all checked in. Now at this point, we can “Publish Offline GPO to Active Directory.”Just go ahead and do we want to override it? Why yes we do, so we’ll go ahead and say “Yes” to that.
Now that that’s all done, let’s go back to the real GPMC here. We’ll go ahead and “Refresh” the “Group Policy Objects” here. We’re looking for that “Manage Flash Player with Group Policy and PolicyPak.” You can see here, there are all the settings that we put right into the GPO directly.
That’s the whole point. We are fully compatible with Active Administrator. If you are an Active Administrator user and you are using it for the advanced Group Policy management style features to back up, restore, perform history and do modeling on your GPOs themselves, you’re in good company because PolicyPak is going to work with it.
Thanks so much, and I’ll talk to you soon.
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Application and Desktop Management
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