Maintaining Group Policy is a chore that every Active Directory administrator will have to tackle at some point in their careers. You will learn that you can make life much easier on yourself and future admins by documenting all settings and configurations as you build out the environment. In fact, quite a bit of this chapter relates to good practices that make future work inside Group Policy flow more smoothly and efficiently. Utilizing Starter GPOs certainly saves some time and effort on your part, and delegation of control is all about removing items off your plate so that you can focus on bigger-picture things. We also spent time learning about the backup and restoration options available for our GPOs, as these will certainly be critical pieces of our security stance, and absolutely need to be recoverable in the event of a failure. ADMX and ADML files are always a tricky bit for admins new to Group Policy administration, so we covered those as well.

Even if you maintain your domain perfectly and never make any mistakes, someday you are bound to run into an issue that you cannot easily explain and that you will need to dive in and troubleshoot. Turn the page to continue on with our next chapter, which is all about troubleshooting in your Group Policy environment.