Systems Management

I use Policy Maker. It is a nice extension to Group Policy, much of which cannot be found with any other product. It has a really tiny footprint on the workstation and requires NO dedicated server at all. So it’s really a cake walk to implement on your network.

But there are some drawbacks.

Policy Maker licensing is brutal. Expect to buy at least twice the amount of licenses as you have actual users and workstations. PM counts objects, so service accounts, etc. all count against your licensing count. PM supposedly has a "grace period" of 14 days if you were to find yourself over your count. But the grace period may or may not actually allow you 14 days. It was less than an hour for some workstations during my testing.

This can be a problem if you actually need those settings.

Desktop Standard will tell you that you can filter the licensing to only those OUs which you need. Whether that is a practical approach is questionable. I found it to be more trouble than it is worth and just had my firm pony up the cash for more "seats".

When you renew your license or increase the count, there is no easy way to actually apply the new license to the GPOs in which you have applied a PM setting. They do have a Java Script batch file that will help you update the license in each GPO. (it copies the license file directly to the sysvol for each GPO ... which is really clunky!)

There is no logging solution for PM, or any way to easily get a report of what GPO's have PM extensions applied to them. If you apply PM settings to numerous GPOs it can get a little confusing, so you will be better off if you limit PM to just a few dedicated GPOs.

There are some basic functionality shortcomings as well. For example, you can use PM to set a registry entry, but you can't "import" a .reg file. Little things like that.

I have developed a love/hate relationship with Policy Maker at this point. I depend on it for many little updates and settings that I can't easily achieve any other way. But the oddball licensing has caused me no end of headaches.

When I complained to my sales rep about the licensing costs actually being double, his only response was “Do you expect to use Policy Maker for free?” Nice!