Group Policy design and change control for administrators
The administrator's side of Group Policy: link order on a container, purpose-scoped GPOs and naming, the ADMX Central Store, preferences vs policies, password policy and fine-grained password policies, and backing up, testing and rolling out GPO changes safely.
- Level
- Advanced
- Length
- About 75 minutes
- Contents
- 3 lessons · final exam
- Status
- Published · updated 1 Oct 2026
Skills you'll practise
- Predict which GPO wins when several are linked to the same OU, using link order
- Design purpose-scoped, consistently named GPOs and choose between a policy setting and a preference item
- Build or update the ADMX Central Store without breaking existing editing
- Explain where domain password policy comes from and when to use a fine-grained password policy instead
- Back up, restore or import GPOs correctly, and roll out a change through a pilot OU with modeling and results
Course outline
- 1.Designing GPOs: scope, link order and namingLesson · 22 min
- 2.Templates, preferences and password policyLesson · 25 min
- 3.Backup, testing and change controlLesson · 25 min
- 4.Group Policy design and change control for administrators: knowledge checkKnowledge check · 14 questions
- 5.Final exam10 questions · passing it completes the course, so people who already know the material can test out
Sources it draws on
The lessons and questions are written from these references, so learners can go back to the original.
- Microsoft Learn: Group Policy processing for Windows
- Microsoft Learn: Group Policy Management Console in Windows
- Microsoft Learn: Create and Manage Central Store
- Microsoft Learn: Group Policy Preferences (Windows Server 2012 R2 documentation, archived)
- Microsoft Learn: Remove this item if it is no longer applied option
- Microsoft Learn: Account Policies (security policy settings)
- Microsoft Learn: Configure fine grained password policies for AD DS
- Microsoft Learn: Backup-GPO (GroupPolicy module)
- Microsoft Learn: Import-GPO (GroupPolicy module)
- Microsoft Learn: GPO Operations: backup, restore, import, copy and migration tables (Windows Server 2003 GPMC paper, archived)
- Microsoft Learn: Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management 4.0 lifecycle
See it with your own jobs and topics
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