Reddit mentions of Group Policy: Fundamentals, Security, and the Managed Desktop

In modern computing & when dealing with a domain, you're rarely going to touch the Registry much less consider fucking with it exception for very rare circumstances or if you're a very very very very big organization.

There are some books this book is usually the standard recommended that I've seen. Otherwise, you're using sites like these from the source. (I wish that site wasn't so hard to find.

I also recommend, judging by the comments, reading this may be helpful: https://darksim905.com/blog/index.php/2017/02/17/rsysadmin-frequently-asked-questions-an-ongoing-series/

As many other users have stated, it really sounds like you're dealing with a bunch of dinosaurs. For a guide on getting things right, I wholeheartedly recommend Jeremy Moskowitz's group policy book. http://www.amazon.com/Group-Policy-Fundamentals-Security-Managed/dp/1118289404 (you can get a taste on google books too)

It's 1100 pages long because the A+'s scope is incredibly wide. You have to be comfortable with all of the objectives, which encompasses roughly every hardware component you would see in a lot of legacy and modern computers and multiple Operating systems and diagnostic tools. Sometimes yeah, he goes into a bit too much detail for the exam itself, but the knowledge is important. For example, his detailing on how the CPU pulls from RAM is a bit over the scope of the exam. But you'll get a better understanding of why he's telling you this as you get further into the field. Plus, knowing so much detail about every little bit of information will make it very, very difficult for you get to questions on the exam you're unfamiliar with.


And as a fair warning if you're planning to make it much further into IT, get ready for a lot more reading and a lot of it will probably be just as much of a slog. One of the fundamental Group Policy Object books is about 900 pages alone.

I've been struggling with the same thing in my environment, so I'm not sure I can answer this question for you. That being said, I've been doing a fair bit of reading on best practices for this issue and from what I can tell the general consensus is "what works best for your environment".

I've been organizing users and computers into their own OUs by department. That may not work best for your environment though. You may need to do by physical location, both in the office, and nationally/internationally.

I've been architecting mine to best be able to use GPOs and GPPs. Again, you'll want to think about your final setup here. Are you going to have printers mapped by location? Are you having specific printers for specific users or groups? Do your users move between floors? Between sites?

These are questions I've been learning to ask when thinking about AD design. I've been reading The Practice of System and Network Administration and I can't recommend it enough. Another book I've been reading is Group Policy: Fundamentals, Security, and the Managed Desktop. The Group Policy book is a great resource and poses different scenarios out to help with organizing AD which I found particularly helpful.

As for those "migrated" users, you'll likely want to put them in the proper OUs, it sounds like there was a merge or something similar in this environment. It may be best to just start over and rebuild the domain, but that's a big if.

I just read the majority of this: Group Policy Fundamentals... - thought it was great. It filled in a lot of little gaps in knowledge I had.