Usually, when a company is utilizing Group Policy as a piece of the overall security puzzle for their network, we most often look to Policies in order to fulfill our needs. As you now know, policies enforced by Group Policy are set by the administrator, and remain set no matter how hard the end user attempts to reverse those policies. On the other hand, sometimes what we really want is not necessarily a strict enforcement of particular settings, but a configuration applied to users or computers in order to make the workday more friendly and efficient for those employees. This is where we begin to move over to the Group Policy Preferences side of the house, which is the topic we are here to discuss. 

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• How is a preference different from a policy setting?
• Create, Replace, Update, or Delete
• Green and red marks
• The Common tab
• Implementing preferences
• Summary