New Feature in Windows Server 2008 RC1

I downloaded Windows Server 2008 RC1 yesterday and had a chance to play with it a couple hours last night. A feature that is new to Server 2008 and is now available in RC1 is Group Policy Preferences. Well this feature is not new to us at Sagemont since we've used it for about 3 years now. Last year Microsoft purchased DesktopStandard the maker of PolicyMaker Standard and PolicyMaker Share Manager. Since then I have been anxiously awaiting word on Microsoft's intentions for the product. I was told that Microsoft would either integrate the product in the base code or it would make it available to customers with Software Assurance. Microsoft announced yesterday that they would make Group Policy Preferences available in the base product which is great news for everyone.

Like I said we've been using the product for about 3 years and was dreading the thought of managing our network without it. Here are some of the things we manage with it.

• Manage local Administrative Account passwords on all workstations. The admin password is the same on all workstations and can be changed in a few minutes via group policy.
• Manage local Power Users and Administrators group membership on workstations. No more rogue local admins.
• Centrally manage Task Scheduler. One uses is shutting down and restarting workstations at night so workstations run more stable, changed computer policies get applied and we can reduce our electric bill for 100 computers We also schedule nightly defrag jobs using the XP building defragmenter so workstations run better and IT has a cost savings in not needing to buy commercial software.
• Manage workstation shares. No workstation is allowed to share files so we wipe all non administrative shares. If you need to share it there are file servers that we backup that can share it much better since the file servers are faster than the local workstations and we do not backup local workstations.
• Push Exchange/Outlook settings to local workstations so local users and helpdesk never has to manually configure Exchange connectivity. Although it does look like this feature has been removed from the Microsoft product.
• Manage network drive mappings, registry settings, and copy files and folders to workstations without using a single logon script.

Now that these features will be deployed in Server 2008 it looks like we will be accelerating our plans on deploying Server 2008 domain controllers. My next task is researching the transition from PolicyMaker to Group Policy Preferences. You can find a whitepaper on Group Policy Preferences at DesktopStandard's website.