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Improved Windows Group Policy Suite to Ship

AutoProf is set to release this month Policy Maker Professional 2.0, a significant update of the company’s suite of user management extensions that plug in to Microsoft’s Group Policy Object Editor in Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.

The product provides extra capabilities to administrators using Microsoft’s Group Policies in Active Directory by taking advantage of extensions that Microsoft has specified.

The new version of Policy Maker Professional adds support for an additional 11 Group Policy extensions to the 11 already provided in Version 1.0 of Policy Maker Professional, which shipped last spring. Among the newly supported extensions are data sources, devices, services, folder options, local users and groups, network options, power options, scheduled tasks, Start menu and regional options.

Additionally, improvements to better manage users’ Control Panel access promise to “help keep the number of maintained desktop images to a minimum [and] also alleviate a significant number of help desk calls while keeping users out of the control panel,” Policy Maker product manager Kevin Sullivan said in an e-mail to ENT earlier this week.

While the Portsmouth, N.H. company has not announced an official ship date for Version 2.0, it has consistently said, as recently as the end of September, that the product will be available in the fourth quarter. And Sullivan’s e-mail this week said that the company has “release bits” in hand. AutoProf’s Policy Maker Professional 2.0 is priced per seat managed.

About the Author

Stuart J. Johnston has covered technology, especially Microsoft, since February 1988 for InfoWorld, Computerworld, Information Week, and PC World, as well as for Enterprise Developer, XML & Web Services, and .NET magazines.

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