So let's summarize what we've learned in this module on group policy deployment.
So again, the best designed balance is aid and management needs.
So being able to do things like delegating administration and efficiently targeting GPOs is kind of
what I mean by that balance.
And you can take a number of different approaches to that.
I showed two approaches.
One was a role based approach and the other was a geo or business unit based approach that allows for
all use structures that kind of optimize for both aid and group policy management.
And I set aside a number of principles that I talked about for good group policy deployment design.
And one of those, probably the first one was deploying GPOs by linking them as close to their intended
targets as possible and only using security group or WMI filtering or item level target as an exception.
I think this is a really good tenant to follow.
Sometimes you won't be able to based on your requirements, but if you start from this premise, then
you'll have as efficient a group policy design as possible.
I also introduced the concept of functional versus monolithic GPOs.
Functional being GPOs that have a single policy area implemented in them, monolithic meaning multiple
policy areas implemented in the GPO.
And I also mentioned that both can have their place in the environment.
You might use monolithic to delegate administration to a single EU administrator, whereas functional
is good for example security settings.
Functional GPOs can perform better.
Primarily because of that issue I mentioned around synchronous and asynchronous extensions.
And while we're on that topic, you can improve performance by reducing the use of group policy based
scripts, not mixing sync and async client side extensions and keeping an eye on the number of GPOs
that get processed by users and computers.
So all of those methods can have an impact on processing performance and therefore the users experience
and I mentioned also WMI filters that they some filter queries can be expensive and can cause slowdowns
in your environment.
So you want to keep an eye on that.
And then finally there are some OS features that have been introduced in newer versions of Windows like
GP caching and log on script delays.
These are designed to reduce the impact of GP processing, but they can also change the behavior of
group policy.
So it's important to keep those in mind.
And in the case of GP caching, you are based on the way it works.
You are only likely to see it.
You will only see it if a synchronous foreground refresh is happening, only is caused by folder redirection
and software installation in Windows 8.1.
So not very often unless you are using a lot of those extensions.
And the lag on script delay feature introduced a five minute lag on script delay.
So that reduces contention that user log on time, but also delays the execution of log on scripts,
which is yet another reason in my estimation, why using something other than log on scripts for important
stuff like drive mappings and printer mappings is probably a good way to go.
So when the final module of this course, I'm going to spend some time talking to you about scripting
group policy management.
We're going to start off by talking about and primarily talk about PowerShell, but also introduce a
little bit about VBScript within the module.