Using the Settings catalog to more easily customize and manage policies

The settings catalog makes it easier to customize, set, and manage device and user policy settings. Many customers have shared that managing policy configuration through custom Open Mobile Alliance Uniform Resource Identifier (OMA-URI) policy is cumbersome, difficult to report on, and often unsupportable. Our 2105 service release supports your move from Group Policy Objects (GPO) or custom OMA-URI to cloud-based consolidated policies. We’ve added 5,000 settings to the settings catalog for Edge, Office, and OneDrive, including additional settings for macOS and Windows!

With settings catalog, we aim to close the gap on available configuration service providers (CSP) settings in Windows, standardize policy settings across the console (such as with a “not configured” policy option), and simplify the policy creation workflow. Try these new settings in a few ways:

• Start from an empty policy and simply select what you want from a library of available settings.
• Use one of several pre-created templates that will provide the security, user experience, and productivity settings most used by customers.
• Compare what you’ve set as your baseline with what’s configurable in the cloud through CSPs. This is a good option if you still have a number of GPO settings. Last month, we released a Group Policy analytics preview tool that makes it possible to compare your GPO settings with Mobile Device Management policy CSPs.
• Review your custom OMA-URI policies and compare them to the options in the settings catalog. Reporting and conflict resolution greatly improve when you move off custom OMA-URI policies.
• Add policies we’ve introduced this month into your existing already configured baselines.

Explore more detailed information on the settings catalog or watch a short demonstration that Mike Danoski recorded showing a few of the new settings:

As always, keep me posted as you use these settings and let me know what you think of the settings catalog!