Jordan Krause - Mastering Windows Group Policy: Control and secure your Active Directory environment with Group Policy

Neville Sanford is a Sr System Administrator for a national construction law firm. He has over 20 years' experience of working with Microsoft products. From NT 4 to the latest tech, he has worked on many projects over the years. Neville has worked with Microsoft Group Policy for many years, first implementing it in 2005. Neville is married and has 2 children. In his spare time he and his family run a mobile laser tag company.

Anderson Patricio is a Canadian Microsoft MVP and he is an IT Consultant based in Toronto, his areas of expertise are around Microsoft Exchange, Skype for Business, Azure, System Center and Active Directory. Anderson is an active member of the Exchange Community and he contributes in forums, blogs, articles, and videos. In Portuguese, his website contains thousands of Microsoft Tutorials to help the local community, besides of his speaking engagements at TechED in South America and MVA Academy training courses.

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Technology is ever-changing. New pieces of technology arrive on our doorsteps almost daily, often replacing old or outdated items. The race is always on for the fastest processors, the highest pixel counts, the safest cars, and smartphones with screens as big as my head. You get the idea. This is as true in the Microsoft-driven data center as it is in consumer electronics. With every new version of the Windows operating system, both client and server, we see parts and pieces come and go. Out with the old, in with the new, as they say. To give you some examples, it wasn't very many years ago that we were talking about things such as IPv6, Network Access Protection (NAP), and Windows Vista as the latest and greatest things since sliced bread. As technology progresses, so does our mentality about what is important. IPv6 is still a thing, obviously, but it's no longer the topic that everyone is telling doom and gloom stories about. Almost nobody uses it inside their networks, because it's simply not as critically important as everyone thought, and IPv4 networks are still working just fine (before you get huffy with me, remember that I said inside the network). NAP was a terrific idea, I still think so, but nobody took the time to learn and implement it, and so it is officially dead. And Windows Vista? I don't feel like I need to throw many words around here. Suffice to say that my Vista installer disk is safely tucked away, right next to my installation disc for Windows ME.

Turning things around, what are the topics we drool over today? It seems like marketing teams are still drawn to any and every way to use the word "cloud". In addition to that, we are starting to add some terminology such as software-defined networking and hyperconverged infrastructure. We don't even bother with giving new versions of Windows cool names anymore. Starting with Windows 7, operating system names got ultra boring. Now we're not even progressing beyond Windows 10, but just tagging numbers on the end, like 1709, 1803, and 1809.