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Let's talk about what new in Group Policy. Now, in different videos I've shown you how to set up Group Policy, how to edit an Object, how to troubleshoot Group Policy, how to force updates. Now let's kind of back up a little and talk about what does Windows Server 2008 do for Group Policy? What are the enhancements? So what's new in Group Policy? Let's back up just a second and let's talk about Group Policy in XP and in the Windows Server 2003 world. Now, prior to 2003 in the Windows 2000 environment is where we got Group Policy. We saw our first look at it and it jumped a little bit in Server 2003. But by the time the Server 2003 XP world came around, there were approximately 1,700 settings that you could tweak in Group Policy. Now, in the Server 2003 environment, templates, where all the settings for a Group Policy Object were stored in what was called an ADM file. Now, of course, really what those things are doing is making registry changes. It's basically a holder for settings that are going to be made in the registry. Now, it was a great but you need to understand that to understand what's changed in the Vista Server 2008 world. There have now been another 700 settings added, so we're up to 2400 total. A lot of these have to do with security, things like wireless and some other things and so you now have 2,400 total settings. Now, if you'd really want to be a really savvy administrator who uses Group Policy to the max, I can't recommend strongly enough that you get out on Microsoft's web site, you download some of their white papers and also you probably want to go grab some of the third-party books that are out there that you see in the bookstores and on Amazon and some other places. There are some really good group policy books and if this is your responsibility, I would strongly suggest you take a look. With 2400 items, there's a lot of really cool things you can do to secure, not only secure your network, but to help user issues and really cut down on those trouble costs. If a user doesn't need to see a functionality, let's take it away from them and then if they can never see it, they can't accidentally change things. Now, let's go back to the way the templates are stored. In the old 2003 XP world, they were stored in ADM files. They are now stored in ADMX files and this is, here's that word again, the XML format and this gives it a lot of things, but the big one is, is the templates can now be read from an XML file that basically works out to be like a central data store. So it's faster, it's more efficient and here's the big one. Since it's XML, we're averaging per GPO file or per ADM file, if you will, the ADMX files are an average of four megabytes smaller. Now, if you've got four, you know, ADM files, four megabytes, at 16 megs and that translates into much less replication traffic between your domain controllers on your Active Directory Network. OK? So big, big news there in Group Policy. Now, the Group Policy now runs in Windows Server 2008 as its own separate service. Now, this adds some stability and some control and if you actually just want to kill Group Policy, if you've made a change to Group Policy and suddenly everything's blown up, you now have more or less a nuclear option and that is to basically just go in and shut down the Group Policy service and no Group Policy is applied anywhere. OK? It's a drastic measure, but you can do that now. The next thing, and this is a totally new idea because Group Policy was designed to lock down the network, to lock down the user environment and to give us consistent settings across entire domains or organization units, groups and so forth. With that, obviously, predictably, came problems. Hey, wait a minute. I'm in the Sales OU. I'm in the, you know, accounting group or marketing group or whatever and just a few of us down here need to be able to make this particular change in our computer. OK? What that usually led to was additional Group Policy Objects having to be built and applied and people separated out into different groups and so forth. What we have now, new in Server 2008 is what's called Group Policy Preferences and Preferences allow the user to select some of their own settings. So it will enforce a Group Policy, but it'll allow a user to select their own settings. All I'm going to tell you about this is go out and read about Group Policy Preferences. Play with them in a test environment, get to know them and you can use these things. Now, right quick, let me go show you what, where you find these things and just a real quick overview of what they look like. So to see these things, let's jump out to the Group Policy Management Tool and you may have noticed them in some other videos, but if I go into my domain and I look at some of my Group Policy Objects, if I edit a Group Policy Object, you will now notice we have Policies, but we also have Preferences and if I expand Preferences, you can see, for example, Windows Control Settings, say Power Options. We can go in and set some new Power Options or Power Schemes and we can make these things available for users to adjust individually. So anyway, just go play with these things. Get familiar with them and do some reading on them. But it gives you a little bit more flexibility with Group Policy.