About managing applications using Group Policy
What is Group Policy?
Group Policy is a technology built in to Active Directory. The goal of Group Policy is to deliver settings to your desktops and applications. Group Policy does a terrific job with Windows settings, like Start Menu, Desktop, and Control Panel settings but has historically not been tapped for your other applications' settings. In this example, you can see some native Group Policy settings for Start Menu and Taskbar management.
Your administrators are already using Group Policy. It's a part of every Active Directory domain.
What are the components of Group Policy?
There are three main parts of Group Policy, and they're all self-managing:
- Your Group Policy Management Station: This is where you and other administrators create Group Policy Objects (GPOs) from. For PolicyPak, your management station must be XP or higher.
- Your Domain Controllers (DCs): This is where GPOs are stored after being created. They are automatically replicated to all DCs within the domain. Your domain controllers must be Windows 2000 or higher.
- The Group Policy "Client-Side Extensions" (CSEs): These aren't "agents" but rather natural extensions to the Group Policy infrastructure. You must have the PolicyPak CSE on your target machines to embrace the directives from the GPOs you created from your management station. The PolicyPak CSE is supported on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.
Why use Group Policy if I have SMS / SCCM, LanDesk, or something else?
Actually, we encourage you to continue to use whatever application deployment technology you're already using. Some companies can use the native, in-the-box "Group Policy Software Deployment" way to deploy applications. For some other organizations, it doesn't have enough "horsepower. " So, many companies step up to an SMS/ SCCM, LanDesk or other tool to deploy software. And PolicyPak works perfectly with those technologies. Again, the goal of PolicyPak isn't to deliver applications to the desktop. We deliver applications' settings to the desktop. Since we deal only with the settings, we happy with whatever desktop and application deployment method you choose. But to answer the question, "Why use Group Policy if I [already have a management tool...]" the answer is simple. Those tools don't do what Group Policy does. So they can't do what PolicyPak does, which is manage the applications' settings.
How do administrators typically use Group Policy?
Group Policy is terrific because most people can be segmented in a way where you can say "This group has these applications and settings" and "This other group has these other applications and settings." Administrators use the built-in Active Directory idea of an "OU" or Organizational Unit to provide this logical segmentation. Then, using Group Policy, you can dictate what "rules" apply to what segment. So, if someone new joins the "Nurses OU" they are immediately useful because their settings are dictated the very first time they log on. There's nothing for the user to configure -- it's just done for them. And, if they move from one OU to another (due to job change) the old settings are washed away, and the new settings are applied.
What does PolicyPak Software bring to the table?
We bring a way to deliver application, desktop and security settings for all the stuff that Microsoft doesn't do.
We work with just about any application you have:
- Home-Grown / Internal Applications
- 3rd Party Applications
- Applications built-in to Windows (like Control Panel applets, Outlook Express, and IE 7 or 8.)
And, we truely "policy enable" all those applications.
That mans you can truely guarantee that users cannot change those settings.
We literally "lock out" the application's user interface on the client computers so users can't "screw it up."
You can create your own PolicyPaks for your applications using PolicyPak Professional with PolicyPak Design Studio. Or, you can make immediate use of pre-configured PolicyPaks PowerPaks for some common applications.
