Now what I want to do is finish up by talking about yet another popular area in GP preferences.
And that's the GP preferences registry extension.
So this is a really great tool for managing registry changes.
It's available both per computer and per user under preferences.
Backslash.
Backslash Window Settings.
Backslash Registry.
And it's really, you know, if you contrasted with admin templates, which as you remember from a previous
module, requires those DMX files to dictate which registry, keys and values I'm modifying.
The registry extension in preferences really allows for kind of a free form way of setting registry
keys and values.
And it's not just strictly limited to those four policy keys.
It will tattoo the registry because it doesn't follow the same non tattooing behavior as those four
keys under admin templates.
At least it doesn't have to.
Let's put it that way.
You're more than welcome to use GP preferences registry extension to make changes to those policy keys.
That the admin templates policies typically make changes to, but any changes made to the registry outside
of those four keys will tattoo your system unless you work around it.
So it it's really much more flexible than what you've got with admin templates and certainly you don't
have to write custom DMX files to use this extension.
So that part of it is really handy.
It's really kind of goofy, driven utility for making and distributing registry changes.
And it supports kind of three different sort of modes or ways of approaching the problem.
So the first one is to just create an individual registry item so you can pick a key and a value and
set the value on it and push it into your GPO and you're done.
The second one is really not a different mode, so much as a different way of organizing registry items.
So you can actually create collections of registry items.
So if you have a bunch of registry items that you want to sort of associate, maybe with a particular
application, you can create a collection folder in the GPO and then put your registry items into that.
And it's just a good way of organizing like registry changes.
And then finally there's a wizard driven capability that lets you import whole groups or trees of registry
settings on an existing system.
So whether it's the system where you're editing policy or some remote system, you can connect to the
registry and just almost suck the registry keys and values out of that machine.
And into the policy and then deliver that to your systems.
So this is really handy if you've got kind of a gold image of the registry values that you want to push
out.
You can use this wizard to get those into a preference policy and push them to your clients.
So let's look at little bit at this.
So the registry item one is a pretty straightforward UI.
You've got these, you know, basically the Hague HQ, I underscore local underscore machine HQ current
user.
You specify the key path, the value name, and then the value type and the value data, and then you're
done.
With the registry item collection.
What you see here is I've got a collection called collection and underneath it I've got a registry item
called Remote, and that's essentially part of that collection.
And then finally the registry wizard lets you literally browse a registry structure and choose the keys
and values that you want to push into policy.
So let's take a look at that and see how this works in practice.
Will distribute some registry changes and see how it comes out.