I am sitting in the Phoenix airport terminal patiently waiting for my flight home so what better time to make my first post in several days? They provide FREE wireless access here!
The last two days I have been sitting in a CheckFree facility where Jeremy Moskowitz was giving his two day Intensive Group Policy training. I was a few minutes late because I forgot to print out maps before I left, I wasn't joking about being really busy at work! When we started we did the usual I am Anthony and I the sum of my job duties, and the usual tell us something personal about you, he chose what was your worst summer job. Once we got started it was kind of an introduction to what group policy is, what are the categories of group policies, how are they processed, etc. Then we get into some labs, the first ones are used to introduce you to the old console, I hope no one is still using that! Then we get into actually creating the group policies and linking them. We then cover things like linking, enforcing, repairing policies, backing them up, restoring them, WMI filtering, loopbacking, and then software deployment, software restrictions, and roaming profiles, RIS, shadow copies, offline files, folder redirection. These are not in order but it is close.
Jeremy also points out some things that do not work, don’t work like they are advertised, are fixed in Vista, and where improvements could be made. If you missed his newsletter where he said group policy and RIS is better than using SMS to image and deploy software, makes those same points again. Being the only SMS person in the class and knowing a little bit about SMS, I can say from my personal experience that SMS does a better job. I deployed Project 2003 to about a dozen people after class from my hotel room last night in less than 15 minutes, and in SCCM 2007, it only gets better, much better.
If you are new to group policy, or only occasionally work with it and need a better overall understanding of it, I highly suggest his course. He covers it from A-Z in two days. He is a lively speaker and you can tell he is from the right coast. He is also getting ready to release a new version of his book that will cover Vista and also has some software in the works that will allow you to tailor application settings by group policy.
Hopefully next week my schedule will begin to resume some what of my norm, while it is still not normal, but my posting should resume to its normal level.
