Features and Benefits

Group Policy Manager features:

• Control Test: Greatly reduces the number of incorrect or unapproved changes by giving administrators the ability to export GPOs to a test environment in order to validate changes. Once reviewed and approved, it can be rolled out to the production environment. This testing and approval capability includes the ability to control who can make granular changes such as GPOs, Links, and WMI Filters as well as accepting or rejecting those same granular changes. GPOs, Scope of Management, and WMI Filters have their own Version Control subsystems within Group Policy Manager.

• Group Policy Objects Compare: Provides historical reporting, which allows the tracking of changes made to GPOs, Links, WMI Filters,and Templates over time. It also allows the comparison of different versions of GPOs.

• Safe Update: Provides reliable GPO, Links, WMI Filters and Templates version control. GPO editors can check out GPOs, edit and test them offline, and check them back in for review and approval. GPO approvers are notified of proposed changes, so they can reject or approve them, a member of the Deployment group would then deploy all approved changes into the production environment. Group Policy Manager provides the ability to create and define roles, which consist of a set of rights to perform actions within the Version Control system. Predefined roles include Users, Moderators, Approvers, and System Administrators. Custom role definitions are also available

• Rapid Rollback: Quickly revert back to a working GPO in the event that a GPO policy setting, link, security and WMI filter change has an undesired effect. In seconds, the environment can be running smoothly again.