UE-V 2.0 Group Policy Settings Suggestions

I recently upgraded our PolicyPak test lab with UE-V 2.0 from UE-V 1.0. To be sure, there’s really no “upgrade” process. Some snags I ran into:

  • I figured doing an in-place upgrade from UE-V 1.0 agent to UE-V 2.0 agent would magically upgrade, remove the original UE-V 1.0 agent and keep going. Um.. Sort of. It wasn’t until I manually, forcefully removed UE-V 1.0 agent did things work (almost) as expected. I would suggest forcefully removing UE-V 1.0 agent, then installing the UE-V 2.0 agent.
  • UE-V 1.0 used only Offline Files to perform the sync. Now UE-V 2.0’s has its own built-in sync-engine which is supposed to be more robust for “offline” (ie: traveling laptop) scenarios. By leaving the defaults as-is, however, I had very, very “hit and miss” synchronization issues. The built in UE-V sync (left to its default) appears to be a very lazy write. So sometimes it would sync as expected, other times, not quickly enough for me. To counter this, I ENABLED the “Do not use the sync provider”. The caveat here is that this configuration is meant expressly for machines which are ALWAYS connected. Which is fine for me. Setting this to Enabled made UE-V 2.0 very “zippy” syncing from machine to machine.. instead of “whenever it wanted to.”
  • There appears to be a doc bug in the Settings Storage Path. Tip: If you have home drives, you don’t need this at all.
    But if you have NO home drives, you can specify where to store UE-V settings. Be sure to put %username% in there as I’ve done here, even though the GP Explaintext doesn’t say to.
  • Note that the Settings template catalog path doesn’t need that.. because it’s just about the templates and not about the storage.
  • As a precaution, UE-V can use the CSC service, so you can see in the GPPrefs section below, I’ve also forcefully enabled the service as STARTED just to be on the safe side.

Note: PolicyPak will work great if you’re using UE-V 1.0 or 2.0 in any configuration. Here’s the idea.. Use U-EV to roam user’s own changes, but use PolicyPak to deliver and secure IT’s required changes. It’s really easy: once you’re happy with UE-V, just add PolicyPak (here’s the video) and you’ll be able to DICTATE settings (using PolicyPak) instead of just “roaming” them (using UE-V). It’s a perfect combination !

Jeremy Moskowitz

Founder & CTO, Microsoft MVP in Group Policy, Enterprise Mobility, and MDM

Jeremy Moskowitz founded PolicyPak Software after working with hundreds of customers with the same problem they couldn’t manage their applications, browsers and operating systems using the technology they already utilized.

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