Is there a planning tool for implementing Group Policies?

Hi arnorite,

1) a best practices guide
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Best-Practices-Designing-Group-Policy.html

2) you need to look at what YOU want out of group policy :)

are you looking for standardisation
are you looking for restriction
are you looking for folder redirection to a central point
are you looking for roaming profiles
are you looking for security

based on those questions, you can begin to formulate a guideline for your own standards

each company has different requirements and demands for GPO - looking at what you wish to acheive will start you on your path :)

i will help any way i can of course!

There's also the group policy management console.

It's great for planning, since you can do simulations based on users and computers.
Plus it summarizes the results.

the simulations are basically the same as RSOP

Thanks,

From a business perspective we know what we want.  This includes:

- Standardization
- Restriction/Security
- Logon scripts
- Software deployment

We also are using DFS, so folder redirection is not an issue at this point.

Everything we have looked at addresses technical issues.  It's been very difficult to find something that can address the business rules and convert them to the technical configuration.  This applies to any documentation we've found so far, too.

Does this help?

Thanks,

ARite

By the way, I have looked at this

1) a best practices guide
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Best-Practices-Designing-Group-Policy.html

and again, it has nothing to do with business rules.

Thanks

Standardisation - i reccomend setting one policy across the board outlining desktop and the actual "viewing" that a user gets, majority of these settings are set under your start menu and taskbar policies

Security - most of the time i add these to the same policy as above, affectively standardising security as wwll, ie, all internet explorer settings and conrtol panel access

Logon scripts - much better applied to a user account

software deployment - create these as a seperate OU for sure and decide on publishing or Assigning

that link is purely a best practice on overall GPO's nothing more

one more point, avoid changing the default domain policies and also apply your polcies to OU's rather than at the root level

Thanks, but this is not what I'm looking for.  Buisiness Rules to technical config is what we want.  Example:

- Business Rule: 'Group 1' users can't logoff from the workstation

- GP Config: 'Start Menu and Taskbar' | 'Remove Logoff on the Start Menu' = Enabled

Hopefully this clears up what I want.

Thanks

there is no business rules as such, this is what i am getting at, each business has to define themselves what they want out of it

for example, business A that i work with say that they restict the desktop completely, no shutdown, no log off, no desktop properties

business B on the other hand says, no control panel, no properties context of my computer, and forced classic menus

two different businesses, two different set of rules, each based on what they want

I know they're different for each business.  I don't want templates.  I want to be able to identify how to restrict/allow features at a business level, not at a geek level.

Another Example:

Business Rule: Turn Off Internet Access for a specific group of users that I will identify
GP Config: the GP settings I need to impelement

Some businesses may say 'I want everyone' to have full Internet access' or 'I want Internet access to a select set of sites'.  These all deal with the same issue, Internet access.  Obviously different businesses will want different configurations for Internet access.  So for planning, I want to restrict Internet access, then what are the specific GP settings that need to be set for this?  That's what I'm looking for.  And not just Internet access, but all the things that GP affects.

Is there a tool, documentation, web site, company, whatever that can do this?

Thanks for that last response, Jay_Jay70!  It looks like it's the closest thing I'm going to get to what I want.  With a little work, I think I can get the questions answered that I'm looking for.

Thanks again,

ARite

no problem at all

James