Creating a Group Policy Object (GPO)

- [Instructor] When it comes to group policy management, one of the most basic items you need to be familiar with is something called a group policy object or for short, sometimes it's just referred to as a GPO. So what is a group policy object? Well, just like it sounds like in the name, it is an object in Active Directory and this particular object contains group policy settings. Now, there's all kinds of stuff we can do with these group policy objects and these settings that are contained within, and we'll go through a lot of that as we go through the different videos in this course. But right now I want to show you how you would go ahead and create one of these group policy objects. So to do this, I will tell you I am on a domain controller and I'm looking at the Server Manager, so in the upper right, I'm going to go up to the Tools menu and you'll notice there's an option here for Group Policy Management. We're going to be doing almost everything in this course in this tool right here, Group Policy Management. When looking at this tool, you can see here that we have our landonhotel.local forest and if I expand that, you'll see here that it breaks it down into the different domains in this forest, the different sites in the forest and then actually a couple of extra little tools that we'll talk about later on in the course called group policy modeling and group policy results. Now, if I expand the domains, you see here I have one domain that exists in my particular forest and the name of that forest is landonhotel.local. If I expand that domain, I will see all the different containers with the organizational unit containers that I can work with when it comes to group policy. And I will explain a little bit more about that later, as well as being able to see group policy objects and certain filters and starter GOPs and stuff like that. So we're going to go through pretty much all of this as we go through the course. But for right now, let's just keep it simple. How do we create a group policy object? Well, the obvious thing might be to click on a container here that says group policy objects. So I'm going to click on it and you'll see here that there are two group policy objects that are actually created by default when you create the forest in the domain, okay? So this happens by default and it's always, and I'm going to do the bottom one first, the default domain policy, which you will always have to pretty much by default use this to affect everything within the domain and then the one on top is the default domain controllers policy, which is one that is used specifically to control settings on your domain controllers. Now, I don't want you to worry about that too much now because we will again, we'll address these a little bit later. But I want to show you how exactly would I go ahead and create a new group policy object? Well, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to right click on the group policy objects. I could also right click in the blank area. Either way will be fine and then I'm just going to select new. And from here, there's not a whole lot to do. When you are first just creating a group policy object, what you do is you go ahead and give it a name. So I'm just going to call this one Demo GPO, just to give it a name. And the only other thing we would do at the point of creation would be to determine if we were going to use a source starter GPO, which we are not going to do in this case, and in fact, I will talk to you about using a starter GPO in another video. So for right now, I'm going to show ya, create the GPO, just give it a name, click OK. And just like that, I have created a new group policy object in the landonhotel.local domain. There's a whole lot more that needs to be done with this besides just putting it here and I'm going to go through that as we go through the different videos in this course.