Managing Group Policies in Active Directory can be a daunting task. Microsoft has provided administrators with many different tools for managing all of the different components of Group Policy that it almost seems impossible to know where to turn for a particular policy update. With the introduction of the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC), this problem is no longer an issue.

GPMC is Microsoft's new user interface for managing enterprise-wide group policies. It combines the features of the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in, the Active Directory Sites and Services snap-in, the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) snap-in, the ACL Editor, and the Delegation Wizard into one complete interface for group policy management.

Additionally, GPMC adds some new functionality not readily available in previous tool sets. Some of these new features include the ability to backup and restore group policy objects (GPOs), import and export GPOs, copy and paste GPOs, script GPO operations that are exposed within GPMC (however, you cannot script the settings within a GPO), manage Group Policy-related security in a simplified manner, and create HTML reports.

To take advantage of the GPMC, you must install the tool on either a Windows 2003 machine, or a Windows XP SP1 machine with a Post-SP1 hotfix (Q 326469). Last, and most important, the GPMC can manage both Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 Active Directory domains.

The GPMC is available as a free download and can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads