You've got GPOs, but you want to get them to work with PolicyPak cloud or your own MDM service. Here's how to take real GPOs and get them working with whatever you already have.
Hi, this is Jeremy Moskowitz, and in this demonstration, I’m going to show you how you can take your existing Group Policy settings with Microsoft and export them for use with PolicyPak Cloud or your own MDM service like Intune or VMware Workspace ONE. Here’s an existing GPO linked to my sales team, and it’s doing three things in Microsoft Group Policy land. It’s renaming the guest account, a security setting. I have a preferences item here under Preferences, Shortcuts that I’m delivering the PolicyPak shortcut icon on the desktop. I also have a ADMX setting for Control Panel going to Show only specified Control Panel items, so I’m going to reduce what’s available in the Control Panel.
Let’s just see this working in regular Group Policy land before we export it for use in non-Group Policy land. How are we going to do that? I’ve already got it linked over to the right place. Let’s just go ahead and run gpupdate and just verify that Group Policy is working the way we expect. The first thing we should see is that icon will come from Group Policy Preferences right on the desktop, and we’ll know Group Policy is working the way we expect. There we go. That’s just what we wanted. Then the second thing I wanted to check out, if I were to go to Control Panel, I should see only the two icons that we said we wanted, Date and Time and Sound. That’s correct. Then the last thing we said we wanted to do was take a look at the renamed guest account. Let’s verify that that actually worked. If I were to run gpedit.msc, let’s just make sure that that worked here. If I go to Windows Settings and go to Security and go to Local Policies, Security Options, we can see I’ve renamed the guest account, so you can see group policies working the way we expect.
How do we get ourselves ready to take those existing settings and export them? We make that super easy for you. Here in the GPO under PolicyPak, we have our GPO reduction and Transition Pak folder here with our Export Manager. The Export Manager’s job is to help you quickly export stuff to make it very easy for you to use. What we’ll do is we’ll go ahead and export one by one. The first thing we want to do is on the computer side export our Security Settings. We’ll go ahead and tell you what we can and can’t do, and then we’ll go ahead and get that policy that we have, and we’ll go to export it, and I’m going to put it in a folder on the desktop here called EXPORT1. Okay, and this is my GP-SEC settings. There we go. I’ve exported that.
Next, I’m going to run the same thing on the user side because one of those settings was on the computer side and two were on the user side. Next, I’m going to export my Preferences items here. There we go. If I had drive maps, shortcuts, printers, whatever, great. PolicyPak can export them all, so we’ll go ahead and take those. Go ahead and click Next, and we’ll click Next again, and I’m going to put it in the same exact location, which is my EXPORT1 location. Go ahead and click Finish here, and then I’m going to export my Admin Template settings. If you have one or a million Admin Template settings, it’s super easy for us to look inside the GPO and export them here. We also have other utility that will help you migrate them across multiple GPOS, but I’m showing you the one for inside this particular GPO. I want to export the Show only specified Control Panel items here, and I want to set it for that same exact location, EXPORT1, and I’ll call this PP-ATM-EXPORT1, and that’s it.
We’ve taken our existing Group Policy settings, all three types, and exported them for use in PolicyPak Cloud or PolicyPak MDM. In the next few videos, you’ll see how to take these exported settings, wrap them up, and get them deployed using your tool of choice. Hope this video helps this out. Looking forward to having you watch one of the other videos on this page and continuing your journey. Thanks so much.