Real World Computing

The next thing to do is create a new GPO (Group Policy Object). There are a number of ways to do this, and the one you choose will depend largely on your organisational setup. A very common practice is to create the GPO on an OU (Organisational Unit), which is what I'll be doing, but before that you need to consider what OS you're going to use to create these group policy objects. The problem is that Windows XP and Windows Vista do things differently, and when it comes to Folder Redirection they do it markedly differently. The long and the short of it is that the old practice of doing all your Group Policy creation on the server needs to be buried once and for all if you're going to be dealing with Vista systems, and you need instead to run the built-in GPMC (Group Policy Management Console) application from within Vista to create your GPOs. If you don't do that you won't even see all the shiny new Vista bits and pieces when you come to create a policy, and that's no good at all. The downside is that if you create GPOs this way using a Vista box, you're not necessarily going to be able to edit them using a different operating system, as they're different in format. Next month, I'll show you what's what with Vista's GPO settings, and you should see just why you need to use Windows Vista as your new group policy management platform from now on.

David Moss

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