Now let's review what we've learned about group policy preferences in this module.
So group policy preferences provides a variety of non enforced settings on everything from local user
management to drive mapping to power options.
The list is fairly long.
It also supports four action types within each of those areas, or within at least most of those areas.
Not all of them support these action types, but many of them do, including the ones that we looked
at and they are create, update, replace and delete.
Now of those replace will basically make a preference act a lot like a non tattooing registry entry
from admin templates because it will be removed and then re added that each processing cycle.
So item level targeting is a feature that's available in GP preferences and it allows for setting filtering
based on up to 27 criteria.
Everything from is the computer running on battery to the IP subnet of the computer.
To all you the computer is in to the group.
The user is in a wide variety of criteria.
And these can be combined with each other to form sort of complex conditional statements about the state
of the user computer and whether or not it processes those preferences.
So we looked at cheap local user and group management and that's an area of GP preferences that allows
you to manage locally user and group creation as well as updates and deletes to those two types of objects.
And remember we did talk about the password issue within GPP preferences and how passwords and their
use have been deprecated by Microsoft because they're not stored securely.
So areas like local users and groups, services, dried mappings, ODC data sources and scheduled tasks
all implement or let you implement password policies or password changes or password storage.
And all of those can be considered unsecure.
So you'll want to make sure that if you use those, you tread with caution, because essentially they
can't be they shouldn't be considered secure.
GPP drive and printer mappings.
We looked into those and showed how you can map drives to you and see paths and you can control who
gets those drive mappings based on an item level target for security groups.
As an example.
Printer mappings, you can have shared printers, TCP IP printers or local printers, and you can map
both per computer or per user.
And then finally, we looked at the GPP registry extension, which allows that kind of free form delivery
of registry values.
You can either enter individual values or you can create collections of values where you can use the
registry wizard, which we went through, to basically capture the state of a particular set of registry
keys and values from a known good machine and propagate that out to all other machines or users that
process, that preference.
So lots of power within GPP registry.
And I'd go so far as to say that unless you have to use admin templates, GPP registry is a much better
way to make registry changes because it does allow that kind of free form ability within the UI.
So when the next module, we're going to dive into another scenario, which is the use of scripts both
start up and shut down as well as log on and log off scripts within group policy.