The final group policy management concept I want to talk about in this module is the starter GPO.
So what is the starter GPO?
Well, it's a sort of a reusable model or gold image, if you will, of admin template settings.
So it does only support admin templates and it provides this ability to create commonly used admin templates
that can be used over and over again in new GPOs that you create.
So you start with a starter GPO and Microsoft even provides some kind of default ones out of the box
that might be sort of commonly used configurations.
And then you can edit it just like you would edit a regular GPO using the group policy editor.
But it's only exposing you to admin templates so you can create starter GPOs of security settings or
folder redirection software installation any of the group policy preferences.
It's really just limited to that admin templates policy path.
And again, you can once you've created these sort of templates where golden images of GPOs, you can
then go in and create a new GPO from a starter GPO.
And what essentially happens there is it takes the settings that you've defined in that starter GPO.
And it's very simply just copy them into the new GPO so that when you open up editor on the new GPO,
all of those admin templates, settings that you defined in the starter GPO are already there.
And then you can go and build more settings into that GPO.
But it essentially lets you sort of define a beginning point for a standard, maybe corporate standard
for admin templates.
You know, to be honest, I don't see a lot of people ending up using these, but there have been scenarios
where I've seen them to provide some value.
So I think it's worthwhile to know that they're there and know that they're available.
But just based on the fact that they only include Adnan template settings makes their value really limited.
So let's just kind of dig in and see what this looks like.
I'll just run through a quick scenario so you can see how to create a starter GPO and how to create
a GPO from that.
So you may not have noticed, but if you go down to the bottom of the tree within a domain in PMC,
you have the starter GPOs folder.
And the very first time that you click on it, you'll note this button here that says that you can create
the starter GPOs folder.
And this actually gets created insensible as a special folder in the system malaria that is used to
store your starter GPOs.
And what you'll notice is as soon as I click that, it's created a bunch of templates for Windows XP,
Windows Vista Group Policy Remote Update Firewall Ports and Reporting Firewall Ports.
And you'll see if you go into settings, you can do a settings report just like any other basic admin
template or any GPO that has settings in it.
And it's got a bunch of settings in it.
And what you know, you'll notice that I mentioned previously that it only shows or only supports admin
templates.
And you're probably asking, well, why are there firewall settings here?
Well, what's happening is the Windows firewall with advanced security policy area actually uses the
same registry keys as the old admin templates network connections Windows firewall.
So when it sees admin templates for Windows Firewall defined, it translates those into Windows Firewall
settings.
So that's why you're seeing these here, even though, frankly, these are all just admin template settings.
And I'll show you this in a little bit more detail.
If I go ahead and right click starter GPOs and say new starter GPO.
I'm going to say test starter.
And I'm going to just say this starter is for corporate standard admin templates.
And what I'll do is go ahead and define a couple of admin template settings.
So if I right click on this and open up edit it brings up editor, but it's sort of a stripped down
version.
I only see administrative template options for under user and computer configuration.
So I'm going to go ahead and go into Windows Components.
Under Computer configuration Windows update and I'm going to use this to configure automatic updates.
So I'm going to say this is my corporate standard for Windows Update.
And, you know, I say every day at or every Friday at 3 a.m. scheduled to install and then I can use
this going forward to create a new GPO.
So if I come in under group policy objects and say, new GPO, you'll notice that I have a source starter
GPO that I can use.
And I'm going to pick my test starter and I'm going to say marketing Windows Update policy.
And create from my starter.
Now if I go to marketing Windows Update policy and go in under settings, what you'll notice is it's
picked up the settings from the starter GPO and translated them into this new GPO that I just created.
So essentially I've created this sort of Windows Update standard using starter GPOs and now I can propagate
that forward into any variations on that that I want to distribute.
So that's kind of a simple example of how starter GPOs can work and hopefully you'll see some value
in that.
Like I said, it's not a super commonly used feature, but it can be useful in certain scenarios.