This is a listing of books and articles that I've worked on related to Group Policy.
The first book to know about is the new Windows Group Policy Guide, published by Microsoft Press, that I worked on with Derek Melber and William Stanek. This 700+ page book goes through every aspect of GP in XP and Server 2003 and covers a lot of topics you won't find elsewhere, such as GP internals and in-depth troubleshooting information on GP.
The first two e-books I wrote on GP in Win2k are still available for free by registering for them at the sponsor's site or at Realtimepublishers.com. Check out this site and the many great e-books that are available.
The first e-book is an in-depth overview of GPO technology--how it works, what it can do, etc. The second book takes a Q&A format and attempts to present some common scenarios and questions that I've heard about how Group Policy does its thing. I think both books turned out pretty well and Full Armor had over 30,000 registrations on their site for the two of them, so I guess people like them!
"The Definitive Guide to Windows 2000 Group Policy", published by Realtimepublishers
"The Tips and Tricks Guide to Windows 2000 Group Policy" published by Realtimepublishers
I've also written a series of articles in Windows IT Pro Magazine over the years about Group Policy, starting with some early articles before Win2K even shipped and I was still playing with GPOs in beta. I've listed all my GPO-related articles here:
"Windows NT System Policies", July 1998
"IntelliMirror Adds Manageability", July 1999
"Introducing Group Policy", Sep 1999
"Software Installation in Windows 2000", Feb 2000
"Group Policy Logging", Mar 2002
"Optimize GPO-Processing Performance", Mar 2002
"GPMC Scripting", Aug 2003
"GPO Security", Oct 2003
The Magazine has also recently released a compendium of GPO-related articles, including one of my own, into an E-book, that can be downloaded here.
In addition, I wrote a whitepaper recently in my capacity as CTO for Microsoft Solutions at Quest Software. Its called:
And its an overview of the structure and function of Group Policy, in case you're looking for a quick primer on GPO technology.
If you're interested in using the GPMC to manage production deployment of GPO, check out my article in the Microsoft Server 2003 Deployment Guide on "Staging Group Policy Deployments". It goes into detail about how to use GPMC features such as GPO copy and the migration tables to move GPOs from test to production.