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NetIQ Ships Group Policy Administrator v5

NetIQ is shipping version 5 of its Group Policy Administrator package, an update that includes support for after-hours Group Policy Object (GPO) deployment as well as cross-trust management.

The new after-hours deployment feature lets administrators schedule automated deployments to fit within the narrow time windows required for GPO deployment in strict change-control environments.

The cross-trust GPO management capabilities provide centralized management of Group Policy, including domains outside of a trust boundary, according to a NetIQ statement.

GPA 5 also features what NetIQ calls enterprise-consistency enforcement, a set of functions that maintain GPO consistency and allow automatic synchronization of GPO changes enterprise-wide, eliminating “a tedious and error-prone manual process.”

“It also provides deep diagnostic reports [including] the ability to compare two Resultant Set of Policies (RSoP) reports,” says Melanie Achard, product manager for San Jose, Calif.-based NetIQ. The new reports let administrators directly compare two RSoP reports to immediately see the differences in the way GPOs are being applied to both sets of user and computer pairs.

NetIQ Group Policy Administrator 5.0 starts at $9 per user.

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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