Tag: Group Policy Preferences

Group Policy Preferences Processing Order

Just to clarify something that people should be aware of, the Group Policy Preferences processing order. Within each CSE the settings are applied starting at number one and working down from there. I know it sounds obvious, but the documentation generally read as “starting with the highest”, which I think leaves room for confusion as “the highest” could mean it finishes with one, especially when you look in the context of Group Policy and that the last setting applied wins.

Anyway, one and down from there.

Enabling Individual Settings Within A Group Policy Preference

When you’re creating a set of Group Policy preferences, you can set all kinds of settings in a very similar way to how you would if you were sat in front of the machine. For example, IE settings are very intuitively laid out and it really is just like doing it within the internet control panel screen;

IE Preferences

The key thing to remember though, is that in a lot of cases, just setting the preference isn’t enough, you have to enable it too. So for example, entering a homepage into the preferences panel will not make it actually apply, as you can see the lines underneath it stay broken red, which means that the setting will not get applied;

Setting Not Applied

Although it’s not mentioned within the policy at all, there are keys you can press to enable or disable individual settings, or the entire page, and these are documented on Technet.

Basically, to enable the homepage setting we saw above, after you’ve finished entering it, press F6 and this will turn the line under the settings to green and this means that then this will get applied;

Applied Setting

So from this you can enable or disable any setting from within the policy, and hopefully take a little more control over your Internet Explorer settings going forwards.