Group Policy Overview The System policies provide another instrument to help system administrators control user access to the network and manage desktop settings, including data sharing and configuring system settings | Group Policy Overview The System policies provide another instrument to help system administrators control user access to the network and manage desktop settings including data sharing and configuring system settings. The system policy represents registry settings that are automatically loaded when the user logs on to the system. The main difference between system policies and user profiles is that the system policy is applicable to users user groups and individual computers. Administrators can specify modify and support registry settings for each of the components just listed. By combining system policies for individual users specific computers from which the user logs on and for user groups to which the user may belong the administrator can get complete control over the types of user environments and user rights and permissions. To define the system policy settings the administrator simply creates system policy templates. The System Policy Editor tool was first introduced in the Windows NT operating system. It allowed administrators to specify configuration settings for users and computers and store these settings in the Windows NT registry. Using this utility administrators could manage user work environments and specify configuration settings for all Windows NT computers both Workstation and Server . Starting with Windows 2000 this tool was replaced by the Group Policy MMC snap-in which extends the capabilities of the System Policy Editor SPE and provides many additional options for managing client computer configurations including registry based policies security settings scripts and folder redirection. Group policy settings specified by the administrator are stored in the Group Policy Object GPO which in turn is associated with one of the Active Directory objects site domain or organizational unit . Group Policy implemented in newer versions of Windows NT-based operating systems has many significant advantages over the Windows NT system policy not
