So let's shift gears now and talk about IEEE Maintenance Policy, which I mentioned at the beginning
is being deprecated or has been deprecated by Microsoft.
If you're running either Windows eight or above or you have a system running IEEE ten and above.
So that includes Windows seven Systems.
Now, as I mentioned, IEEE maintenance policy has been around since the beginning and it has had issues
in the past.
So what I want to do is talk a little bit about how it works, but then also dig into sort of how you
can get rid of it.
So IEEE Maintenance Policy is per user only, just like GP preference policies, and it does allow you
to configure many of the same things you can configure in GP preferences internet settings.
And what's interesting is that there are some settings in IEEE maintenance policy that you can't configure
in any of the two other areas that I've talked about.
Now, the way IEEE maintenance behavior works is when you're in the policy.
Let's say I want to configure proxy settings through the connection dialog.
What it does is it actually imports the settings from the machine you're editing policy on.
So when you click on that Modify Settings button you see on the screen, it reads the connection settings
configuration from your current IP browser settings.
And essentially imports those into the group policy object.
And this has been problematic in the past because if you go to a different machine with a different
configuration for, let's say, the configuration settings in IEEE and you click on that modify settings
button it, then imports those new settings into your GPO.
Now that was improved upon in later versions of IEEE Maintenance Policy, but there's still some versions
where that behavior can exist, and IEEE maintenance settings kind of behave in a kind of quasi preference
policy way.
So some of the settings will behave like preferences and the user will be able to modify them.
An example of that would be like home page settings.
Some settings will behave like policies and the user won't be able to modify them.
But it will look like they can modify them.
So in other words, the interface won't be grayed out, but they'll be able to, and they'll be able
to make a change to the setting.
But the next time they go in there or the next time policy is processed, the setting will be revert
back to what is in the GPO.
So it's kind of a sort of a mixed bag with respect to how it controls the users interface.
And this is another reason why I think Microsoft has gotten rid of this policy area going forward,
because it is kind of implemented in a sort of half, half baked sort of way.
So, you know, I think if I give any advice about IEEE maintenance policy, I would certainly not make
any new IEEE maintenance policy going forward, given that it's going to be removed whenever you upgrade
your browser past E9.
So any time you're in IEEE ten, the settings in IEEE maintenance policy will no longer impact the browser.
No longer control the browser.
So the best way to deal with this is to remove it.
The probably the easiest way to do that is to simply unlink the GPOs that contain IEEE maintenance policy.
Assuming that's all that they contain or that the other things that they contain aren't important to
you.
So not all settings are going to be undone.
However, when you.
Undo that or unlink that policy.
So you'll probably end up needing to use either GP preferences or admin templates to take over those
settings that are not undone.
And that's where you can run into challenges because if you have a setting, an IP maintenance policy
that's not available in either of those other two areas, you'll run into issues were essentially you
don't have the ability to remove those settings easily.
Now you can reset all the settings within IEEE Maintenance Policy.
So let's say you have a GPO that has IP maintenance policy in it, but it also might have some admin
templates settings, some other settings that you need.
So you don't want to unlink that GPO, but you can right click on the IEEE maintenance node and select
the reset browser's settings option, and that will essentially empty out the IEEE maintenance settings
within that GPO.
So that gives you another way of sort of removing or at least having the IEEE maintenance settings no
longer apply, and then you can go and do your cleanup.