In this chapter, we will be discussing Policies. We are finally ready to talk about and look at actual policy settings within actual Group Policy Objects. As you have seen, much discussion and learning needs to have taken place to understand the management of policies and the options that exist for issuing and filtering those policies. It's kind of like learning how to lasso a wild horse before stepping into the arena next to one. We can't go all willy-nilly creating GPOs and filling them with policy settings until we have learned to control those policies, which is what we have been doing thus far. With great power comes great responsibility, right?

Of course, we have been working within a test lab environment during this reading, so let's blow things up! Of course, we're not really going to do that but we don't need to be nearly as careful as you would when making changes to your production environment. In this chapter, we will talk just a little bit about some topics related directly to the policies themselves, and then we will get our hands dirty by doing a step-by-step implementation of some sample policy settings that you can use to improve life for your workforce.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Managed versus unmanaged policies
• Administrative Templates
• Computer Configuration Policies
• User Configuration Policies
• Group Policy Loopback Processing