ActiveAdministrator by ScriptLogic is a great tool for managing your GPOs. The good news is, PolicyPak is fully compatible with ActiveAdministrator, and works right alongside it. Check out this video see how it all fits together!
Hi, everybody. This is Jeremy Moskowitz, Microsoft MVP, Enterprise Mobility and Founder of PolicyPak Software. In this video, we’re going to see how PolicyPak works alongside ScriptLogic’s Active Administrator.
Active Administrator is a great utility. It helps organizations deal with their auditing of AD security, backup and recovery of AD objects and security in dealing with passwords. It also has a pretty robust GPO management section. To be super clear, this product doesn’t have any superpowers on the desktop. That’s not what this product’s job is. That’s not what Active Administrator does.
Active Administrator’s job, at least in the Group Policy section, is to do check-in/check-out and workflow management around Group Policy Objects. It deals with advanced Group Policy management features about the GPO itself, not about actually managing the desktop itself. So no superpowers on the desktop. If you’re using Group Policy to do that, the good news is that’s what PolicyPak does and we can integrate perfectly with the GPO management around Active Administrator.
Let’s go ahead and check out and see how that works. I’ll go ahead and create a “New” GPO in Active Administrator. I’ll call this “Manage Flash Player with Group Policy and PolicyPak.” It goes and creates that there. As we can see, the “Group Policy Management Editor” opens. We’ll just do what we do in our other PolicyPak demonstrations.
We’ll dive down under user side “PolicyPak/Applications/New/Application” and there it is, “PolicyPak for Flash Player.” We’ll make our configurations happen. You can watch how this actually affects the Flash client later. If you wanted to “Block all sites from using the camera and microphone”or you wanted to “Never check for updates” or things like that, you could certainly do that. That’s it as far as we’re concerned for that. We’ll go ahead and close that out. We’ve made some live changes right there.
Now when it comes to Active Administrator, it also has a full “GPO Repository” and “GPO History” and “GPO Modeling.” I’m not going to go into all that stuff, but let’s for fun if I decide I want to right click over this guy and I want to “Add to Offline Repository.”
What it’s doing now just to prove a point here is that we’re fully compatible with the repository that Active Administrator has, because PolicyPak is real, live Group Policy Objects. It’s not an add-on. It doesn’t have any kind of weird moving parts. It really is regular Group Policy.
If we go down under “GPO Repository” here and we want to “Manage Flash Player with Group Policy and PolicyPak,” we can do all the normal things. If you’re already an Active Administrator administrator, you know how this works. You would “Check Out.” You can see a little check out there. We can “Edit GPO Offline” here.
We can make some additional of different changes if we want to here. We’ll go ahead and we’ll add this change. We’ll go ahead and uncheck that if we want to. That’s totally fine. We’re making some changes. That’s great.
Now that we’ve done that, we can “Check In – Apply Changes.” Let’s go ahead and do that here. Alright, that’s all checked in. Now at this point, we can “Publish Offline GPO to Active Directory.”Just go ahead and do we want to override it? Why yes we do, so we’ll go ahead and say “Yes” to that.
Now that that’s all done, let’s go back to the real GPMC here. We’ll go ahead and “Refresh” the “Group Policy Objects” here. We’re looking for that “Manage Flash Player with Group Policy and PolicyPak.” You can see here, there are all the settings that we put right into the GPO directly.
That’s the whole point. We are fully compatible with Active Administrator. If you are an Active Administrator user and you are using it for the advanced Group Policy management style features to back up, restore, perform history and do modeling on your GPOs themselves, you’re in good company because PolicyPak is going to work with it.
Thanks so much, and I’ll talk to you soon.