Microsoft^® Windows Server^™ 2003 uses administrative templates within Group Policy for configuring registry settings. With the release of Windows Server 2003 SP1, more than 1300 default settings are specified by the administrative templates in a new Group Policy object (GPO). Even so, you will want to customize numerous settings through your own administrative templates.

In this chapter, we will look closely at administrative templates. We will describe how administrative templates are used to create the interface within a GPO, and we will explain how the administrative template is structured to modify the registry values and data. Administrative templates are unquestionably an integral part of Group Policy. Microsoft has used them since Microsoft Windows^® 95 and Windows NT^®, when system policies were the method of controlling security and the computing environment.

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