Microsoft releases new IT tool, Policy Analyzer

On a blog post last week, Microsoft revealed a new tool for IT professional called Policy Analyzer, which as the name suggests is a utility for analyzing and comparing sets of group Policies, or Group Policy Objects (GPOs) more specifically.

The utility is described as allowing “you [to] treat a set of GPOs as a single unit. This makes it easy to determine whether particular settings are duplicated across the GPOs or are set to conflicting values. It also lets you capture a baseline and then compare it to a snapshot taken at a later time to identify changes anywhere across the set”.

Policy Analyzer displays its findings in a table (like the one above), where missing settings are shown in gray, and conflicting settings are shown in yellow. This can then be exported to an excel if required.

The file comes in a .ZIP format, and does not require any type of installation, just run the .EXE file.

You can download the program here.