So let's move on from our initial discussion of administrative templates and talk about how those things
get populated.
The policy options that you see in the ED, where do those come from?
Well, in fact, they have a long history of being provided by what are called AD Amex or ads templates.
What you see in the GP ed under that administrative templates node, all those different subfolders
are generated dynamically based on the admixture template files that exist on your system.
And those files live in the file system on every Windows system in this C Colon Backslash.
Windows Backslash Policy Definitions folder.
They have essentially changed very little over the years.
But starting in Windows Vista and Server 2008, Microsoft moved the format of those files from simple
text files where both the policy registry entry definitions and the strings that you see.
The words that you see in editor were combined in one file in the EDM world to this new world of Adam
X Files where the Adam X file contains the registry values that need to be supported.
And the ADMA file the file which the DOT an extension contains localized strings.
So depending on which language version of Windows you're running, what you'll see in editor will be
localized policy settings.
So if you're on a French version of Windows, you'll see French text appearing under admin templates.
Or if you're in on an English version of Windows, you'll see English text.
So the Adam X format, which is now also XML, makes it a lot easier and more flexible when it comes
to supporting multiple languages and multiple sources of information from a sort of design perspective.
But the bottom line is that Adam X Files and just like Adam files before them were the things that drive
what you see in editor.
So let's look at a little bit more depth into these things.
So this is just a screenshot of the C colon backslash windows backslash policy definitions folder on
one of my test machines.
And you'll see all these Adam X files.
There's 176 Adam X files that Microsoft ships out of the box in this particular version of Windows.
And I can add to this depending on what I'm trying to control.
In addition, if I drill into this, you'll see a subfolder called in U.S. and that stands for English
U.S..
And in that subfolder, all the admin files, there's one admin file for each add amex file.
And it contains those ADL files contain the language specific strings that get populated into the editor
when these things are loaded.
So how does this correspond really to what you see?
So what I've done is I've taken a screenshot of the management editor and drilled in under Windows components,
within admin templates and auto play policies.
And there's a set of four options on the right hand side of the screen.
How this actually gets created and populated is driven by the contents of the auto playground file.
So that auto play dot n's file gets loaded up when you load editor past, the XML is parsed, merged
with the strings in the ADMA file and essentially turns into what you see in the editor, this folder
that says auto play policies and the settings those four settings and they're options are all defined
in those ads and ADMA files.
Note that and I see this sort of confusion a lot.
Adam X And ADMA files are only used by admin templates, settings, no other policy area be it security
or GP preferences or internet explorer's maintenance or folder redirection.
None of those other policy areas are controlled by Adam X Files.
Only what you see under user configuration admin templates or computer configuration admin templates.
Now this notion of having Adam X files driving what you see in editor is completely extensible.
You can extend what you see in the editor by creating your own custom Adam X and ADMA files.
Now again you can arbitrarily populate registry settings using these Adam X and ADMA files to define
those registry settings.
And in fact lots of third parties do this.
Citrix Firefox, Mozilla, Google, Chrome, even other Microsoft products like Microsoft Office provide
their own Adam X files that let you configure those products.
And it's important to recognize that when you write your own, it has to follow the proper schema and
format for Adam X.
And in order to do that, you would typically use some kind of you could certainly use notepad or something
that creates text files.
But Microsoft has a free tool called Adam X My Greater.
Its initial role in life was to let you migrate or convert EDM files in the old Windows XP days to Adam
X Files.
But it also has an authoring editor that you can use to sort of jumpstart writing these things.
And again it's you can configure any registry value using ad amex.
But if it's in, not in one of those four non tattooing registry keys that get removed each time admin
template policy is processed, then anything you can figure via adma will tattoo the registry.
So that's just something to keep in mind.
You know, that you're free to create these custom DMX files.
But they don't necessarily fall into the non tattooing behavior unless the application that you're trying
to configure or control will look in those four keys for their configuration settings.
So I mentioned that admixture and ADMA files by default are stored on the local workstation undersea
colon.
Colin Backslash Windows backslash policy definitions.
So each person that runs editor will consult that directory as ED comes up to build the tree of stuff
that you see under admin templates.
Now there is the facility to do something called the Admin Central Store, and a central store is really
just a copy of all the local DMC's and ADMA files stored in the system folder that's replicated to every
domain controller in an Active Directory domain.
And specifically you would copy the contents of your C colon backslash windows backslash policy definitions
folder to this folder structure under backslash backslash domain name backslash sizable backslash domain
name backslash policies.
Backslash Policy Definitions.
And once you do that, everyone in the domain that's editing GPOs were viewing or reporting on GPOs
using PMC and editor will refer to that so it essentially overrides what you have undersea colon backslash
window backslash policy definitions and everyone uses the same adma x files.