Taking the Merging ADM files (Migrating GPOs to RES Workspace Manager – Part 5) blog post to the extreme, here is a demonstration of merging all the default Windows 7/2008 group policy ADMX files. By default there are 148 separate ADMX files that make up the “default” GPO settings available within the Group Policy Management Console (on Windows 7). If we needed to recreate these in RES Workspace Manager we would need 148 separate Registry Policy objects . Each Registry Policy object within the RES Workspace Management Console can only be based on a single ADMX file. Believe me, this is not pretty. Note: It’s not recommended that you do this and this example is for demonstration purposes only. Only merge the ADMX files that contain the options you need to set!
What follows is how we can create one (albeit very big) ADMX/L file that can be uploaded into RES Workspace Manager.
- Open the Virtual Engine Toolkit.
- Select the “Merge ADMXs” tab.
- Drag’n’drop all the ADMX files in the default “C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions\” folder (when run on a Windows Vista or later computer) into the top window.
- Specify the output location directory.
- Specify the output filename (the ADMX and ADML file extensions will automagically be added).
- Click the green “Toolkit” button (and wait!).
On my laptop this took approximately 30 seconds and resulted in a combined 4.27MB “Win7_Defaults.ADMX/L” files. Load this into the RES Workspace Manager Management Console (it takes a little while!) and it looks like this:
Simple! And there’s more to follow…
