Good riddance to Internet Explorer Maintenance! For years, IE Maintenance has been so easy to setup but so difficult to troubleshoot or remove. The worse things is that it looks like a policy but acts like a preference. Your first step to migrating off IE Maintenance is to get a list of any GPO that has that CSE configured. Your next step is to decide between administrative templates or Group Policy Preferences. Here is what you need to know to get full use out of Internet Explorer Maintenance Replacements:
Tag Archives: Group Policy Preferences
Gathering Active Directory Mobile Phone Attributes
“How can I get import numbers into the Active Directory mobile phone attribute?” That was the most common question to the Reset User Password with Self Service blog post. While it would be easy to do this with a massive CSV, that method still means you (the IT Administrator) will have to maintain it. Today, I have two automatic ways for you – both delegate the work to the end user and allow you to keep working on cooler things!
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Group Policy Verbose Mode: The One Group Policy Setting That You Need to Enable
Group Policy is an extremely flexible and complicated tool. One question I am asked quite a bit is, “Can you give me a list of settings I need to enable?” The short answer is No, Microsoft has already enabled the vast majority of things that should be enabled. And while Microsoft’s guidance may change over time (see Offline Files as an example of this), most settings stay the same. There is one setting, however, that is not enabled by default. If you are going to use Group Policy and want to make your troubleshooting life easier, you will want to enable it.
(Re)Installing the Microsoft XPS Printer
In all of my brilliant wisdom, I thought it would be a wise idea to remove the Microsoft XPS Document Writer from all of my machines.
Why did I do this? Well – three years ago, I had a site that switched to Windows 7. A common complaint was that their default printer would sometimes change to the XPS document writer and the user didn’t know where that printer was located. It was useless to explain that it was a “fictional” printer so I did the logical thing and deleted the printer using Group Policy Preferences. Boy was I dumb! Until now, I thought I was stuck with that change.
Tracking Down Rouge CSEs: IE Maintenance GPO in Windows 8
“The time has come the Ballmer said to talk of many things. That IE Maintenance has to go and Blue will ship in Spring.”
Wait – what! IE Maintenance has to go? Come again Mr. Ballmer – did you just say it is already gone?
Holy Crap! It really is gone!
If IE Maintenance is missing, how can I edit settings like a homepage? The easy answer is – use a Windows 7 GPMC. The best answer is – use a Windows 7 GPMC to migrate those settings to Group Policy Preferences or Administrative Templates.
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