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Tag Archives: Group Policy

Get-Needle: Searching for Scripts in All the Right Places

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Don’t you hate it when you can’t find what you need? In our department, we share all of our scripts in a single folder. This folder had some serious organizational issues. Duplicate scripts, missing modules, random folders, etc. Finding that one script that you need doesn’t have to be hard! In this guide, we will create a PowerShell script store and learn an awesome trick to make content searching so much easier!

Organizing and Linking to Your PowerShell Script Store

In the root of your current script folder, create four sub-folders named: Scripts, Modules, Tasks and Tools. If your root folder is named scripts, it may seem redundant to have a sub-folder with the same name but stay with me. Your structure should now look like this:

Get-Needle: Searching for Scripts in All the Right Places

Start by populating your Modules folder with any custom PowerShell modules that you use. Our module store contains the MDT PowerShell CMDlets and several user made modules from the TechNet Script Gallery.

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Automating Hardware Driver Installation on Windows 7 and Above

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Automation is the key to our success. By using Group Policy, we can automate the deployment of software, settings, printers, drive mappings and pretty much anything else for our users and computers. For me, hardware has always been the item that didn’t want to cooperautomate*

Anytime users get new printers or scanners, we have to install the drivers. Most of these drivers come with bloatware and applications that simply are not needed. Windows Vista marked a change in hardware management. This management continues to get easier with Windows 7 and Windows 8. We can now automate driver deployment, driver updates, and hardware management. We can use these methods to automate hardware which makes our users happier and our jobs easier.

In this guide, we will walk through setting a central storage area for drivers, populating that store, getting our clients to use that store, and allowing standard users to load specific drivers. As a real-world example, we will go through the driver installation, extraction, and deployment of a desktop scanner.

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Creating the Group Policy Central Store – Updated for Windows 8.1/2012R2 and Windows 10/Server 2016

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The Group Policy Central Store has two big benefits for every Windows Administrator. First, it allow you (plus anyone else with the GPMC) to have the latest Group Policy administrative templates available. Second, creating a central store will significantly reduce the amount of storage being used on your domain controllers! In this article, we are going to create/update our Group Policy Central Store. We will make the Windows 8.1/Server 2012R2, Office 2013, and a few other ADMX files available to our entire IT department.

To get an idea of how the Group Policy Central Store works, explore your Sysvol for a second. Open an explorer window and navigate to \\DOMAINNAME\sysvol\. Open up any subfolders until you are inside the policies folder. We are now looking the GUID of every Group Policy Object (GPO) in our domain.  Open up any policy and you should see a few subfolders. The most common are: ADM, Machine, and User.

Windows 10 / Server 2016 ADMX

By default, your ADM folder will contain five ADM files. Each client will also have a copy of these files. Every policy that you create will automatically include this ADM folder. Our domain has four domain controllers and 767 group policy objects. Each policy would have a 3.46 MB ADM folder in it. That means that our domain uses 10.4 GB of space to store ADM files! Imagine how much space is being wasted in your sysvol.

The great thing about creating the Group Policy Central Store is this will have zero impact on your client machines! Each client already has a local copy of any Administrative Template and the GPMC will simply use the Central Store to pull its available Administrative Templates.

Getting a Bird’s Eye View of Your Group Memberships with PowerShell

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Getting a Bird’s Eye View of Your Group Memberships with PowerShell

Site migrations suck! And right now, I am stuck in the middle of one. This week, I was tasked with migrating applications and settings for 1,000 computers. Because our applications and settings are controlled through Group Policy (and scoped with security groups), we have a lot of groups that need to be matched and migrated.

Wanting to get a bird’s eye view of my group layout, I put together this script. It is still very much a work in progress but I hope it will help you in your own Active Directory/Group Policy cleanups or migrations.

 

Grabbing Our Data

This script starts by prompting you for a computer name. It will then use the Quest AD Cmdlets and find the OU that this machine is a member of. Next, it will grab every computer that is in that same OU.

Clear-Variable Groups -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

$SearchComputers = read-host "What is the computer name?"

$Computers = Get-QADComputer *$SearchComputers* | Select-Object ParentContainer
$Computers = Get-QADComputer -SearchRoot $Computers.ParentContainer | Sort-Object Name

$SearchComputers = Get-QADComputer *$SearchComputers* | Select-Object ParentContainer
$SearchComputers = $SearchComputers.ParentContainer

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Pinning Programs to the Taskbar with Group Policy

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This post has been superseded by the Pin Programs to the Taskbar in Windows 10 with Group Policy article. You can continue reading below for an overview of how pinning works at the OS level. The article below also contains two corny jokes.

 

The Taskbar in Windows 7 and the Start Screen in Windows 8 are the first places your users should go to access their applications. Unfortunately, users do not take advantage of these locations by pinning programs. Instead, they will cumbersomely search the Start Menu or minimize twelve applications to get to the desktop. It is time to make their life a bit easier!

In part one of this two part series, we will cover pinning programs to the Taskbar with Group Policy. In part 2, we will cover similar tricks for managing the Windows 8 Start Screen. No matter your OS, making applications easier to access will certainly make your staff happier!

Pinning Programs to the Taskbar with Group Policy

Outlook in two less clicks! YES!!!


How Can I Pin Programs to the Taskbar with Group Policy?

Not as easy as you would think. It can’t be done with Administrative Templates. Though you can use Group Policy Preferences, it isn’t fun or flexible. The best way (so far) seems to be with Group Policy Scripts.  Here is the funny thing about programs that are pinned to the Taskbar. They aren’t exactly stored clearly or cleanly.

For an application to show up on the Taskbar, it must have a corresponding shortcut and appear in a specific registry value. The shortcut must exist under the current user’s roaming appdata (%APPDATA%). The exact location is at: %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar

The registry key is the tricky part of this equation as the program values are stored in the Taskband Current User registry key. This key can be found at: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Taskband. And it looks like:

Pinning Programs to the Taskbar with Group Policy

See the tricky part now?

Because the values above are unique to the specific programs pinned, you can deploy this registry key (along with a shortcut preference). This way involves a bit of work and isn’t self documenting. It does work if you have one standard taskbar for your environment that doesn’t change. For a simpler way, keep reading.

 

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