Use PolicyPak Scripts whenever you need to deliver something that in-box Policy, Preference or PolicyPak cannot normally do. Find your scripting superpowers and manage those non-domain joined machines !
In a previous video, you saw me use PolicyPak “Scripts Manager” to create a “User Side Script Policy” that will deliver a shortcut. Just a simple little base hit thing for us to hang our hat on. In this video, I’m now going to take the same exact policy that we have. Just to quickly review it, the first thing it’s going to do is when the policy applies, it’s going to drive in a shortcut, and when the policy doesn’t apply anymore, it’s going to drive in a script that will delete a shortcut. Pretty simple.
In order to use this in PolicyPak Cloud land, all you’re going to do is take the item, you can either right click and “Export as XML” or you can just drag and drop it right into a folder, which is what I’m going to do. Now it should live right there in the folder. We’ll get to that guy in a second.
The second thing I want to do for all my PolicyPak Cloud people here is maybe I want to do something on the system side. I want to rename the “Ethernet” adapter. If you try to do this as a standard user and you try to “Rename” this, you kind of think it let’s you but then you get prompted. You’re not allowed to do this, but you could do this if you were system context as a systemwide script.
How would we do that? I found this little handy-dandy script off the Intertubes right here. We’re going to “Get” the “NetAdapter,” the one that is called “Ether*,” and then “Rename” it to a “NewName” that I’m going to call “AwayNet.” It doesn’t matter. It’s just a simple script for us to use for this demonstration.
This time, I’m going to go on the computer side, go to “Scripts Manager,” right click, “Add/New Policy” here. I’m not going to do the thing I did earlier. I don’t want to “Apply this policy to all users who log on to the computer.” No, this time I want to “Apply this policy to computer.” This is a systemwide policy that’s going to affect everybody on the system.
I’m going to just make an on script. This is a “PowerShell script.” I’m going to paste in my little script here. It’s going to find the ones called “Ether*” and “Rename” them to “AwayNet.” Just something simple just for you to see it work. I don’t need a “revert action.” When this thing hits, I just want to do it. I don’t care if it ever peels back. I just want to set it and forget it and not think about it anymore.
That’s it. I can make it “Always,” “Once” or “Once or when forced.” I’ll just do it one time. I don’t see any reason to do it more than once, so I’ll go ahead and just do it “Once.” I will say “PP Scripts Computer System script.”
You could also wrap this whole thing up in “Item Level Targeting” if you wanted. You could say only do this thing when it’s a laptop (“Portable Computer”) or it’s Windows 10 (“Operating System”) or I’m on this “IP Address Range” or whatever. I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to hit it for everybody and be ready to go. Now that I’ve got that script here, I’m going to drag and drop this guy into my PolicyPak Scripts XML folder (“PPSCRIPTS XML”) for safekeeping.
Now I’m ready to go into PolicyPak Cloud, which is right here. If you’ll remember, PolicyPak Cloud has this idea of the special “All” group where every computer will get this or your “Company Groups” so you can dictate which computers are going to get these settings. I’m going to go whole hog and I’m going to put these both into “All.”
I’m going to “Upload and link a new XML here.” I’m going to “Browse” for the first one. This is the user side one that’s going to create a shortcut, so “PPSCRIPTS: Shortcut Create.” I’ll go ahead and “Add” this guy. Then I’ll go ahead and add my second one, “Upload and link a new XML here.” This one is going to be the one for the computer side, so “PPSCRIPTS: Rename NIC.” There we go. So I’m ready to go. I’ll go ahead and click there, and we should be ready to rock.
At this point now, I’ll go over to my endpoint. I’m going to install the “PolicyPak Cloud Client.” Now in your world, you might already have the PolicyPak Cloud Client already installed. This does require admin rights, so I’m going to get prompted here. But I’m doing this as a standard user, so we can see that two things will happen after I join PolicyPak Cloud and get placed into the All group. The first thing is I should see the script generated shortcut here, and the second thing is that I should see the Ethernet get renamed from “Ethernet0” to I think it was called AwayNet.
You can see here’s the “All” group. There we go. The shortcut just showed up here. Let’s go ahead and “Close” that. I’m just going to refresh this. Let’s see what happens. There we go. As soon as I hit F5, it came right in. We’re ready to go.
With that in mind, now what I could also do is I could maybe make this shortcut go away. How do I do that? Go back to PolicyPak Cloud. Let’s say goodbye to that shortcut here. Here we go, “Shortcut Create.” Then we’ll go ahead and “Unlink XML Data file from Computer Group” so it’s no longer applying to that computer anymore, or all the computers. Go back to PolicyPak Cloud.
We could either just wait a little while if we wanted to. PolicyPak will sync naturally every 60 minutes or so. Or we can run “ppcloud /sync” and this will note that the PP Script item isn’t there anymore. Watch the little birdie here. If all goes well, just like that it gets automagically deleted just like that.
That’s the beauty of PolicyPak Cloud and PolicyPak Scripts. You can set an on script and an off script. You can wrap it all up with item-level targeting and say only do this thing when it’s true and peel it back when it’s not true. You can do things on the user side for users to see, and you can do things on the system side that will affect the entire computer.
With that in mind, don’t forget PolicyPak Cloud is amazing not just for domain joined but also for non-domain joined machines, computers that may never come back into the office and never check in. Now you have an extra way to manage the heck out of them.
I hope this helps you out. Looking forward to getting you started with PolicyPak Cloud real soon.
See ya.