Best Practices

• Build a small test bed, or two, where you can test various things relating to Group Policy. We very much like having a complete domain running in VMWare, Virtual PC, or a similar virtualization environment. It is an invaluable tool to tinker and learn with.

• Download and peruse the settings reference for Group Policy in Windows Vista. Dig further into anything that triggers an interest and try it in your environment.

• Get some references specific to Group Policy. Jeremy Moskowitz's book on Group Policy, or better yet, one of his seminars, are excellent choices. Jeremy has forgotten more about Group Policy than many of us will ever know. More information is available at http://www.GPanswers.com.

• Give your administrators computers with Windows Vista now, if you have not already.

• Start building GPOs specific to Windows Vista.

• Do not mix settings for Windows XP and Windows Vista computers in the same GPOs.

• Apply security settings sparingly. Stability is inversely proportional to the number of security tweaks you make, whereas actual security is rarely linearly proportional with those same tweaks.