By Orin Thomas
Labcasts are great combinations of traditional screencasts and virtual labs. When you access a labcast, you first watch a presentation on a particular technology, including a demonstration of how to use its functionality to perform common tasks. The second part of the labcast involves you then performing the same steps as you just saw in the first part of the presentation. This allows you to get a “hands on” feel for the information in the lesson you’ve just viewed.
This labcast explores Advanced Group Policy Management, a technology that can be used to extend group policy management in Windows Server 2003 environments. In the first part of the demonstration, you will learn about the change control node of the extended group policy management console. The exhibit shows how to use the change control node to configure domain delegation. This involves assigning administrative roles to user accounts.
You’ll learn about each role’s rights and permissions and how you can leverage that to manage group policy by listening to the labcast.
TIP: You'll learn about each role's rights and permissions and how you can leverage that to manage group policy by listening to the labcast.
By watching and participating in the labcast, you’ll learn how to use the console to submit group policy change management requests to users that have the appropriate permissions to edit group policy objects. Part of this process is shown in the exhibit.
A key concept of Advanced Group Policy Management is that rather than apply group policy changes directly, the tool allows modifications to be done on checked out copies of GPOs. It is only users that have been delegated the approval role who are able to deploy a modified GPO copy to the production environment. During the labcast, you will learn how this administrative role separation allows one set of administrators to perform the grunt work of editing group policy objects without having the ability to actually apply those edits directly to the production environment.
You will also learn in the labcast how to view an audit-trail so that you can see specifically which users have created, checked in and deployed specific group policy objects in your Active Directory environment. This audit-trail is shown in the next exhibit.
Although the release of Windows Server 2008 is just around the corner, it will be some time before most organizations begin to make the transition to the new technology. In the meantime, you can use tools like the AGPM console to better implement group policy change management operations within your organization. To learn more about the AGPM console, access this labcast by navigating to the following link for a lesson in Advanced Group Policy Management