Managing Applications Using Group Policy Software

What is Group Policy?

Group Policy Software is a technology built in to Active Directory. The goal of Group Policy Software is to deliver settings to your desktops and applications. Group Policy Software does a terrific job with Windows settings, like Start Menu, Desktop, and Control Panel settings but has historically not been tapped for your other applications' access settings. In this example, you can see some native Group Policy Security settings for Start Menu and Taskbar management.

 

 

Your administrators are already using Group Policy Software. It's a part of every Active Directory domain.

What are the components of Group Policy Software?

There are three main parts of Group Policy Software, and they're all self-managing:

Why use Group Policy Software if I have SMS / SCCM, LanDesk, or something else?

Actually, we encourage you to continue to use whatever application deployment technology you're already using. Some companies can use the native, in-the-box "Group Policy Software Deployment" way to deploy applications. For some other organizations, it doesn't have enough "horsepower. " So, many companies step up to an SMS/ SCCM, LanDesk or other tool to deploy software. And PolicyPak works perfectly with those technologies. Again, the goal of PolicyPak isn't to deliver applications to the desktop. We deliver applications' access settings to the desktop. Since we deal only with the settings, we happy with whatever desktop and application deployment method you choose. But to answer the question, "Why use Group Policy Software if I [already have a management tool...]" the answer is simple. Those tools don't do what Group Policy Software does. So they can't do what PolicyPak does, which is manage the applications' access settings.

How do administrators typically use Group Policy Software?

Group Policy Software is terrific because most people can be segmented in a way where you can say "This group has these applications access and settings" and "This other group has these other applications and settings." Administrators use the built-in Active Directory idea of an "OU" or Organizational Unit to provide this logical segmentation. Then, using Group Policy Software, you can dictate what "rules" apply to what segment. So, if someone new joins the "Nurses OU" they are immediately useful because their settings are dictated the very first time they log on. There's nothing for the user to configure -- it's just done for them. And, if they move from one OU to another (due to job change) the old settings are washed away, and the new settings are applied.

What does PolicyPak Software bring to the table?

We bring a way to deliver application, desktop and security settings for all the stuff that Microsoft doesn't do.

We work with just about any application you have:

• Home-Grown / Internal Applications
• 3rd Party Applications
• Applications built-in to Windows (like Control Panel applets, Outlook Express, and IE 7 or 8.)

And, we truely "policy enable" all those applications.

That mans you can truely guarantee that users cannot change those settings.

We literally "lock out" the application's user interface on the client computers so users can't "screw it up."

You can create your own PolicyPaks for your applications users using PolicyPak Professional with PolicyPak Design Studio. Or, you can make immediate use of pre-configured PolicyPaks PowerPaks for some common applications.