In this book, we have already discussed a few recipes that call for the modification of Group Policy Objects (GPOs), but we have not taken the time to discuss why Group Policy is important in the first place. To those who have worked within Active Directory for a while, Group Policy may be familiar territory. I still find, though, that many IT folks working in the Server Administrator role are not overly familiar with Group Policy and how it can benefit them. Particularly in smaller companies, this incredibly powerful feature of Windows tends to be overlooked. It is easy to think of Active Directory as the storage container for your user and computer accounts, because those are the core necessary tasks that it accomplishes. But as soon as you install the Domain Services role to configure your first Domain Controller, you have automatically included Group Policy capabilities into that domain.

Let's walk through some recipes together to make sure you are able to interact...