To the average business professional who doesn’t work in an IT department, Group Policy is a generic phrase that could represent just about anything. It could be the new human resources policy or the latest program instituted by the accounting department for processing expense reports.

Group Policy definitely has a very broad and somewhat nonspecific ring to it. IT professionals, however, recognize Group Policy as the central management tool that allows IT administrators to organize and control levels of access within an Active Directory environment. Group Policy is part of the Windows Server family and is widely used in small business, educational and enterprise environments.

The nuts and bolts of Group Policy can get very intricate depending on how many levels within Active Directory a company has, but the easiest way to explain it is: Group Policy gives IT administrators the power to control which people get which accesses.

For example, an accountant does not need the same programs that a human resources professional needs. And business owners don’t want proprietary sales information or pricing available to necessarily everyone on the network.

Depending on professional classification and department, access levels vary, and Group Policy makes it simple to set up such groups. So, there could be Accounting I, Accounting II, Accounting III, etc. Those in Accounting I would not necessarily need the full gamut of programs, but those in senior level roles would.

There are several advantages to the Group Policy infrastructure. Consider that Group Policy:

• Has a wide reach – it can control the operating systems and applications that nearly anyone in the company uses – but it is also very controlled.

• Simplifies the work of IT administrators who can now select a few checkboxes to give a new hire in marketing all the accesses she needs or set up the new hire in accounting with the appropriate software programs, etc.

• Makes it easy to add categories, so it is very fluid and easy to modify.

• Saves the IT staff countless hours, because an application can be uploaded and installed one time and then made accessible to entire groups, as opposed to having IT personnel upload software to each individual machine and then adjust each user’s settings.