Starter GPOs bring the template concept to group policy administration. Using this feature can make your group policy implementation easier to use and understand. Starter GPOs also facilitate sharing GPOs between environments. They limit you to registry-based settings at the present time, but most group policy settings do fall into the Administrative Templates category, and you can always use the old copy-and-modify method for GPOs that need to incorporate other types of policies. GPOs built from starter GPOs work just like GPOs built from the ground up.

All in all, this feature won't double your productivity overnight, but it might be a convenient time-saver, and when it comes to group policy, we'll take all the convenient time-savers we can get!

System Requirements: 

You have to use either the Server 2008 version (6.0.0.1) of the Group Policy Management Console, or the post-SP1 Vista version which is part of the downloadable Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT). The version of the GPMC that Microsoft bundled with the original version of Vista, 1.0.2, does not have the Starter GPOs node in the navigation pane.

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