Group Policy in Windows Server 2012: Overview

Now that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 have been released, we’d like to share with you some of the exciting enhancements that we’ve added for Group Policy.

While we hear plenty of great things from people who use Group Policy, we also hear complaints. By far the largest complaint we hear about Group Policy has to do with troubleshooting GP. Our main goal for Server 2012 was to improve the troubleshooting experience.

We added 3 new features to make your life as a GP admin easier. In the next week we’ll detail each of these improvements in their own blog post, but for now here’s a quick overview.

· Remote GP Update: Allow you to remotely update policy on one client computer or an entire OU, through the GPMC or through Powershell

· GP Results Report improvements: We’ve changed the layout and added a bunch of new information to the results report, including relevant events, specific callouts for disabled user/computer sections, extension processing time, and more!

· Infrastructure Status: We’ve made it easy to check in on replication status to make sure GPOs are propagating properly.

If you just can’t wait to learn more, there’s additional documentation of new features here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831791.aspx