Windows Server 2012 introduces a new feature for Group Policy, which allows an administrator to remotely trigger a Group Policy update at will. This is very useful, because until now, any update required the administrator to either wait between 1.5 to 2 hours for all domain computers to automatically update themselves, or manually run the update command on any computer that he wanted to have updated. Some clever administrators developed their own way of doing this using various automation and remote-management tools, but now this is built right into the operating system.
The feature, called Group Policy Updates works by remotely creating a scheduled task on each computer in the domain or group. The scheduled task is triggered to run within 10 minutes, with a random offset, so as to not hit your domain controllers with many computers updating at the same time. The task simply runs the GPUPDATE /force command, which performs...