Searching for group policy settings
Posted in Active Directory by Ben Christian on March 9th, 2006 In my opinion, the biggest shortfall of the Group Policy Editor is the inability to search for the group policy setting that you’re after. In a lot of cases I know that a setting exists but I find myself navigating through the structure to find it. Recently I discovered a better way.
The Group Policy Settings Reference is an Excel spreadsheet available for download from the Microsoft website. It lists the majority of the settings that are available when creating a GPO including the newer settings released with Windows Server 2003 SP1. The settings that it doesn’t include, according to the overview, are “settings that exist outside of the Security Settings extension (scecli.dll), such as Wireless Network extension, Public Key Policies, or Software Restriction Policies.”
Once you download the spreadsheet it’s easy to use the Excel Find function to search for the setting that you’re looking for. Although a search function would be handy in the actual Group Policy Editor, this spreadsheet almost makes up for it.
