How to get the latest Group Policies Objects in your Active Directory

Retrieve latest GPOs

First, we have to get the latest policies. To do this, we can:

• Download the Administrative Templates pack from the Microsoft website: https://support.microsoft.com.
• Or, from any recent Windows operating system, obtain a copy of the C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions folder.

Copy policies to SYSVOL folder

• To create our Central Store for Group Policy Administrative Templates, we need to:
  • Connect to a Domain Controller
  • Paste the PolicyDefinitions folder (reminders: it contains the .admx (policy files) and .adml (language files)) into C:\Windows\SYSVOL\sysvol\domain.local\Policies folder (or into \\domain\sysvol\domain\Policies\).

Check

In the Group Policy Management Console, we can now see we're using the Central Store (Note the presence of the words "retrieved from the central store", which indicates that policies are shared between all domain controllers.).

If there is no Central Store (no \\domain\sysvol\domain\Policies\PolicyDefinitions folder), Policies will be loaded from the local computer (i.e. our Active Directory server).