Parts of this article (those related to Windows 10 issues) need to be updated.(September 2018) |
Group Policy is a feature of the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (including Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2003+) that controls the working environment of user accounts and computer accounts. Group Policy provides centralized management and configuration of operating systems, applications, and users' settings in an Active Directory environment. A set of Group Policy configurations is called a Group Policy Object (GPO). A version of Group Policy called Local Group Policy (LGPO or LocalGPO) allows Group Policy Object management without Active Directory on standalone computers.[1][2]
Active Directory servers disseminate group policies by listing them in their LDAP directory under objects of class groupPolicyContainer
. These refer to fileserver paths (attribute gPCFileSysPath
) that store the actual group policy objects, typically in an SMB share \\domain.com\SYSVOL shared by the Active Directory server. If a group policy has registry settings, the associated file share will have a file registry.pol
with the registry settings that the client needs to apply.[3]
The Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) is not provided on Home versions of Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10/11.
LGPO
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).