After installing Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) and therefore Group Policy, there are a few settings that start taking immediate effect within your network. Not many, but some, and so it is important to know where these are and understand what they are doing. These settings do have the potential to conflict with other GPO settings that you might intentionally put into place, and could cause confusion if there are policy settings on your workstations that you weren't expecting. Fortunately, these items are pretty visible, and we will take a minute to take a look at them here.

Furthermore, there are some default permissions settings associated with Group Policy that you, as an administrator, should be aware of. We will discuss those as well.