Re: Custom GPO and suggested settings

Tech-Archive recommends: Speed Up your PC by fixing your registry

Ok, I'm going to be weird and reply to myself. The document is very helpful and I highly recommend it. The one question that I have is concerning preferences. The document states:

"Preferences are set by the user or by the operating system at installation time. The registry values that store preferences are located outside the approved Group Policy keys listed in Table 1. They are located in other areas of the registry."

Anyone aware of where the "other areas" could be? I tried to move the Junk Mail filter rule out of the policy portion of the tree, but the setting does not seem to take. I haven't exhausted all the options yet, but wanted to see if someone else had a good idea of where they are talking about. If anyone is interested, I think the preference should go to :

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Options\Mail

from

HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Options\Mail

Thanks,
Robert LeBlanc
BioAg Computer Support
Brigham Young University

Robert LeBlanc wrote: 


Simon Geary wrote:

It's pretty easy to create a custom ADM file in Group Policy that can be used to change\add\delete registry values in most (but not all) sections of the registry. This is the white paper that explains all.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e7d72fa1-62fe-4358-8360-8774ea8db847&displaylang=en


If you have particular changes in mind you can post a query back here and you will often find that someone has already written an ADM for it thus saving you the trouble. Although it's a skill well worth learning for yourself though.


Thanks for the link, I'll look into it. I really like learning how to do it.

As for the second question, this isn't really what Group Policy is meant for IMO. I see it as more of a tool for enforcing the settings you want rather than giving users the option, why don't you just leave that policy unconfigured and allow the users to configure it themselves? In any case, you can't do this with Group Policy. A quick way to remove unwanted policies from individual users is to use security filtering with your GPOs, and apply the policy to the group. When you decide you don't want a policy to apply to a particular user, just remove him from the group.


I understand filtering, but I would like to suggest a more secure setting, but allow the user to change the setting at will. For instance the Junk Mail filter level in Office. We have several hundred users (300-400) and only a handful of support personal (the university will not allow us to expand right now) and to have someone moving people into a group to prevent a setting is not feasible. So for the mean time we have to have no security (not a setting that I like). There are settings that I don't want changed, but there are some that I would like suggested. I guess this is more of a feature request if it doesn't exist. It seems like a simple enough implementation, but I could be very wrong.

Robert LeBlanc
BioAg Computer Support
Brigham Young University

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