Migrating GPOs to RES PowerFuse (Part 3)

So far in our ambition to migrate existing Group Policy Objects into RES PowerFuse we have detailed the shortcomings of doing so (Part 1) and discovered that all the registry settings for the User Container settings (“Administrative Templates” only) in a GPO are stored in the SYSVOL share as a REGISTRY.POL file (Part 2). Now we need to transpose the settings contained within the .POL file into a .REG file that is useable by RES PowerFuse.

Unfortunately, the .POL file format is a binary format that is not the same as the text-based .REG file format. There appears to be no easy way to view the contents of these files. The binary format is documented on the MSDN web site if you feel inclined to have a look. When we open a .POL file with notepad this is what we get:

Registry.pol

Therefore, before we can import this into RES PowerFuse we need to convert it to a text-based .REG file. After many hours scouring the internet, only a handful of solutions seem to be available.

There do appear to be some commercial registry utilities, i.e. Registry Workshop, that permit the loading/viewing of .POL files. The evaluation version of Registry Workshop does not allow exporting so it is unclear as to whether a .POL file can be exported as a .REG file that we can use with RES PowerFuse. In addition, we’re after a solution that doesn’t cost any money.

An alternative is the REGVIEW.EXE utility in the Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit. This does allow us to view the contents of the REGISTRY.POL file. Running the utility displays the contents of a .POL in text format like this:

regview_registry.pol

Unfortunately, this utility does not allow us to convert the REGISTRY.POL to a useful format, e.g. CSV. To utilise this tool we will have to redirect the output to a .TXT file, e.g. REGVIEW REGISTRY.POL > OUTPUT.TXT. Once in a plain text format we would then have to run another tool or script to convert the output to .REG. This is going to require some development time to implement.

To be continued…

RES Automation Manager 2011 Release Date

According to the new look RES Software web site, RES Automation Manager 2011 (formerly RES Wisdom) product will ship on the 1st November 2010. I can reveal that the RES Wisdom 2011 Release Candidate has already been rebranded as RES Automation Manager 2011. More details/information on the new features will published once the final product is available from the RES Software web site.

RES Software have Rebranded

RES 2010 Logo

Today, RES Software’s web site has a new look and feel. In addition the RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom products have also been rebranded. Here are the highlights:

  • RES PowerFuse will be now known as RES Workspace Manager.
  • RES Workspace Manager will no longer be licensed as different Editions, rather each module will be licensed separately (Yay!).
  • RES Workspace Manager Modules:
    • Composition & Personalization
    • Advanced Administration
    • Security & Performance
  • RES Wisdom will be known as RES Automation Manager.
  • RES Automation Manager Modules:
    • Task Automation
    • Resource Provisioning
    • Service Orchestration
  • The RES Dynamic Desktop Studio will be available as the new bundle of all technologies.
  • RES Subscriber/Workspace Extender will be known as Virtual Desktop Extender (VDX) and available as a standalone product from January 2011.

Overall – exciting times!