Chapter 29. Group Policy Management for Exchange Clients

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding Group Policy Management with Outlook

• Baseline Administration for Group Policy Deployment

• Outlook Client Group Policies

• Administering Outlook Through Group Policy

• Updates and Patch Management with Group Policies

• Best Practices

To further enhance the management features and options available with Exchange 2003 clients, Microsoft has developed new features and tools. These new enhancements enable client configuration and options to be managed and pushed to client systems using Windows Group Policies.

Using Windows Group Policy management tools, administrators can easily and inexpensively centralize many of the duties and support tasks previously demanding time and resources when working with Exchange clients. With Windows Group Policies, tools and resources available on the Office 2003 Resource Kit (ORK), Exchange client settings—and more—can be configured centrally and applied to Exchange clients in the enterprise using the Domain Group Policy functionality.

Group policies can provide extremely powerful administration and management support methods to desktops and Exchange clients. This chapter provides insight to the resources, available options, and best practices, as well as the techniques available to minimize administrative overhead and support Exchange 2003 client systems.

Administrators can leverage the information in this chapter to support the day-to-day tasks involved with managing Exchange 2003 client systems and users using Windows Group Policy. The new tools enable administrators to centrally manage Outlook and Outlook preferences, and customize the look and feel of Outlook and additional options by using only Windows Group Policy and policy security templates.