This snippet taken from The Definitive Guide to Building a Windows Server 2008 Infrastructure, a free e-book sponsored by Tricerat. Get your free copy of the entire 10-chapter bookhere.

As you'll also see in the image below, the potential for customizable control available through GPPs is remarkable. Within either half, one can easily control elements like drive mappings, environment variables, files and folders, data sources, local users and groups, power options, printers, and much more.

To give you an example of one use of GPPs that has traditionally been accomplished through login scripts, consider your need for setting drive mappings for users' home drives. With login scripts, the process to accomplish this task typically involves creating the script, storing that script in the domain's SYSVOL, and configuring each user to process the script through their user object within Active Directory Users and Computers. Using GPPs this process gets quite a bit simpler. In this example, let's assume that home drives are typically mapped to the H: drive and are stored within the \\w2008a\homefolders share. To use a GPP to set this for all computers in the domain, use the following process:

• Create a new GPO and launch the GPME. Navigate to User Configuration | Preferences | Windows Settings | Drive Maps.
• In the right pane of the resulting screen, select New | Mapped Drive. The window will look similar to Figure 6.9.
• Within that window, change the selections to match what is shown in the image below. Click OK when complete.
• Close the GPME and link the GPO to the domain.

By completing these four steps you have accomplished the same drive mapping that required scripting knowledge as well as the time-consuming management of user-specific settings within Active Directory Users and Computers. Yet this is completed in a much shorter amount of time and with much easier management and troubleshooting in the future. Through their reliance on Group Policy for distribution, GPPs enable common customizations to be managed through the same tools used to manage Group Policy.

Tomorrow, we continue the discussion with a talk about the differences between "policies" and the "suggestions" GPPs bring.