Which applications would you want to control?

Here's a question I have for people...

Imagine you could "Group Policy Enable" any application.

Which applications would you want Group Policy Enabled?

Would your day-to-day administration be easier if Adobe Acrobat reader were policy enabled? How about Lotus Notes? Or, would you give your left arm to be able to control more "stuff" in the control panel (and if so, what stuff?) :-)

So.. let me know... Reply here.. would very much like to hear your thoughts.

Thanks.

[AdamV]

Given how fixated Notes is on configuration still being stored in files, I can't see that coming any time soon!

For my money, printers would be a great place to start - being able to push printers out to machines based on their site and OU / group membership, or to users based on site and groups. AND importantly, control the default printer.
I can do nearly all of this with scripts (and have written some pretty damn complex but robust and scalable Kix scripts to do this) but a GPO approach would be far easier.

Already "do" printers... and Even WS03/R2 actually has a GP / printers component... (I'll explore that in two newsletters from now.)

I'm looking for applications, which are mostly registry based, which if you were making a wish... you would be able to control via GP.

[scottzaiss]

AutoCAD would be a great one to have. I've done a lot of custom templates but have never gotten around to doing one for AutoCAD because there are so many settings and I haven't had the time do one that big.

The other one that would be great but the app isn't registry based would be Outlook. I still can belive MS hasn't moved the e-mail config to the registry so that it can be managed like the rest of Office.

Scott

[AdamV]

Actually it's surprising how much of Word's config is still stored in the normal.dot file, but yes, Outlook would be high on my list too, as well as making all of office easier to customise / change after deployment (rather than through the .mst custom install approach).

..both by an ADM template and DesktopStandard's PolicyMaker Pro.. so.. that option *IS* I guess already available.

Any thoughts on, say, WinZip, Hummingbird XCEED, or any 3270 emulator applications out there? Anything like that?

[Eric]

Adobe Reader

Adobe Acrobat

Citrix PN Agent

Citrix Program Neighborhood

<insert vendor's name here> antivirus software

Macromedia Dreamweaver

Macromedia Contribute

Softricity Softgrid Client

Winzip

[americantabloid]

Hi Jeremy!!!

I'am not quite sure that I understand the question, do you mean installation packages or do you mean controlling settings for a certain applications without needing to modify the msi-package or both?

Best regards
at
Sweden

What if you already had your applications deployed. Once deployed,
which applications would you wish you could control using Group Policy?

[americantabloid]

Hi again and thanks for the reply!!!

Now I'am with you.

I'am running the network configuration for a couple of schools, we are basically running free software (for cost reasons),

This is the main applications that we use GPO to deploy

OpenOffice2...
Would have been nice to be able to fine tune settings, but it works ok with one general configuration made to the installation package.

Adobe Reader...
Same as with OpenOffice. Once the msi package is tuned by the Adobe Tuner, we haven't had any reason to change any configuration.


One thing I would have liked is to have a free email client totally configurable by way of GPO. That is high on our wish list.

(Our most problems are with older special applications that aren’t made to run in a locked down environment and applications that are not easily deployable thru GPO policies.)

I know that my answer got a bit off track, but that is my 2 cents...

Best regards
At
Sweden