So now I just want to illustrate how Windows IEEE Maintenance Policy works.
Some of the concepts that I just talked about.
So let's go in under Internet Explorer Maintenance, and I'm on this Windows seven system that has IEEE
nine on it.
So I can still see IEEE Maintenance Policy in the editor.
And let's say I wanted to go in and make a proxy setting.
You'll note that it throws this message that says Settings you make on this page will import will overwrite
imported settings from the connection settings page.
And I can go in and actually make changes to the proxy.
I can tell it to use the same for all of them, whatever happens to be.
I can just set that on here.
If I go in under connection settings.
This is where I was mentioning earlier that it actually imports the current settings of this machine
that I'm on into the GPO.
So if I come in under LON settings, these are the settings that it's finding on the machine and I can
go ahead and set proxy dot POC file or whatever I want to do.
And these settings are now stored in the GPO, so a lot similar user experience to the preferences area.
I can do things like set the browser title.
So whatever title I want will appear as the browser's window.
So I could say, you know, Internet Explorer from my company dot com.
And that's something that you can do in either preferences or admin templates.
So that's sort of unique to IEEE Maintenance Policy.
I can add favorites to the browser so I can push favorites to the user.
And that's another thing that I can't do with either of those other two areas.
Now, there are other ways to push favorites.
You can use preferences, shortcuts to to send favorites to the to the user's browser.
So that's it's not this is sort of an old school way of doing it.
And the new school way would be to just create new URL shortcuts, essentially using preferences shortcuts.
So even though there are some things in high maintenance policy that perhaps you don't see, obviously
in the other areas, things like favorites, URLs, those sorts of things are doable.
You just have to get a little bit more creative about them.
Now, remember I mentioned that if you want to get rid of the settings in here, you can go ahead and
reset the browser settings and it'll give you this message saying that it'll delete all the browser
settings stored in the GPO and asked me if I want to continue and that once it's done, the the browser
or the GPO will essentially be devoid of all Internet Explorer maintenance policy settings.
And again, you have to sort of manage on the client which of those settings remain behind and which
ones get removed because not all of them will get removed.
Some of them will just get left or tattooed on to the system.
So overall, i.e., maintenance policy really doesn't have anything we can't live without.
And given that Microsoft is deprecating, it now would be a good time to get rid of it from your environment
if you're already using it and don't use it if you're not.
09. Summary So to summarize this module, there are three ways that you can configure Internet Explorer
using group policy.
There's group policy preferences, i.e. maintenance policy and admin templates.
And of course IEEE maintenance has been around the longest.
And it has now been deprecated on any system where IEEE ten is installed, and that includes all Windows
eight systems because they came with Windows with Ie11 and any Windows seven systems that have IEEE
ten or IEEE 11 installed on them.
So what that essentially means is that you can no longer either edit or process IEEE Maintenance Policy
on those systems.
Now, preferences lets you configure most IEEE options.
It.
It does cover a lot of the things that IEEE Maintenance Policy did but does not enforce those settings.
So as as I showed in my demo in this module, you can set the proxy setting, but the user can come
along and change it unless you do something about it.
And that's something is admin templates, which does the sort of lockdown part of IEEE configuration.
It doesn't give you as many options for configuring, i.e. as GP preferences does, but it does enforce
those settings.
So for things like site to zone assignments and for disabling the proxy screen and other things, the
IEEE admin templates can be really helpful.
Now you can use a combination of the two, as I did in my demo, to get the biggest bang for your IEEE
configuration buck and I highly recommend that as your approach because it just allows you to sort of
mix and match the two to do lock down in cases where you need it, or to just simply deliver preferred
settings in cases where you don't.
Now, if you are using IEEE Maintenance Policy, I highly recommend moving towards removing it or replacing
it with a combination of the other two policy areas.
And I did show a couple different ways of removing the settings, either on kicking the GPIO or using
the reset browser's settings option on IEEE Maintenance Policy.
Now, one thing to keep in mind is make sure you keep around a system that can still edit IEEE Maintenance
Policy, because if you don't, then you'll have you'll be hard pressed to be able to actually remove
it.
So it's important to keep at least one system running with IEEE nine on Windows seven, for example,
and that will allow you to continue to edit and potentially reset and remove those IEEE maintenance
policy settings.