Have you ever wanted to compare Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) information before and after making some change to your Group Policy infrastructure? There’s no simple way of doing this using the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC), but there is a workaround. First, before you make your changes, run the Group Policy Results wizard from within GPMC and save the resulting RSoP info as an HTML report. Then make your changes i.e. add/remove GPOs, change GPO settings, and so on. Now run the GP Results wizard again and save it as another HTML report. Then use the windiff utility (see http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/159214) to compare the two files.

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Mitch Tulloch was the lead author for the Windows Vista Resource Kit from Microsoft Press, which is THE book for IT pros who want to deploy, maintain and support Windows Vista in mid- and large-sized network environments. For more about Mitch, visit his website www.mtit.com