What is Group Policy

In this lecture, we are going to be learning about Group Policy.

Now, Group Policy is a tool that is used by Systems Administrators to quickly and easily make configuration changes to Users and Computers within Active Directory. I say easily because you can make one change in Group Policy and affect hundreds or thousands of workstations in your domain.

With Group Policy you can implement security configurations across your domain quickly and easily. You can do things like, restrict certain users from login into certain computers, allow only certain users to access certain files, give specific or all users a specific Desktop background, or even deploy software to certain computers within your domain.

Group Policy is a must-have skill if you want to be a Windows Server or Systems Administrator. It is really important that you learn how to use this tool and you’re going to learn how to use Group Policy in this section.

Now, one thing that you must keep in mind is that you cannot understand Group Policy without also understanding Active Directory Users and Computers.

Now, Group Policy works by applying GPOs or Group Policy Objects to the OU structure that you have created in Active Directory. A GPO contains separate configuration settings for both users and computers.

When a GPO is applied to an OU the settings configured in the GPO are applied to the users and the computers that are within that OU.

You can also configure the GPOs to only apply to certain objects by defining the security filter…