The Group Policy Management Console

In "Group Policy Made Great," http://www.winnetmag.com, InstantDoc ID 37554, I wrote about a product that Microsoft was then beta-testing called the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC). In that article, I wrote that the GPMC looked pretty good but was lacking a few things that I hoped Microsoft would rectify. Today, I’m happy to report that the GPMC is completed and that most of the news about it is good.

The first bit of good news is that the GPMC is finished and available for download. To get a copy, go to http://microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=F39E9D60-7E41-4947-82F5-3330F37ADFEB&displaylang=en. While you’re there, you might also need to go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=262d25e3-f589-4842-8157-034d1e7cf3a3&DisplayLang=en to pick up a copy of the Windows .NET Framework—the GPMC requires it.

The first—and worst—bit of bad news is that you can't install the GPMC on a Windows 2000 system: The GPMC runs only on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Professional. So, is the GPMC of any value in a Win2K network? To a limited extent, yes. You can load the console on an XP system, then use it to analyze Group Policy behavior on a remote system. Although that remote system can’t be a Win2K system, it can be an XP system that gets its Group Policy Objects (GPOs) from a Win2K-based domain controller (DC). However, the second piece of bad news is that the GPMC license explicitly says that you can download and run the console only on a network on which you're running at least one copy of Windows 2003. Technologically, nothing prevents you from downloading the GPMC, running it on an XP system that's a member of a Win2K-based Active Directory (AD) domain, and analyzing the Group Policy behavior of other XP boxes on the domain—but you'd violate your GPMC license if you did so. . . .