Group Policy Management – Import registry files

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More and more people are using Group Policy Management to replace their login scripts. Group Policy Preferences where first introduced in Windows Server 2008 and it gives you a structured environment to control all your global settings. Group Policy Preferences are accessed via the Group Policy Management console.

In Preferences you can configure things like Hide and Map specified drives, Folder Redirection, Folder deletion/creation etc. and of course Registry Settings. On this blog you’ll find a lot of articles regarding Group Policy and the XenApp 5/6 and XenDesktop Tuning Policy’s have almost 15.000 downloads.

Working with registry in Preferences normally takes a lot of time if you have many registry keys that needs to be added, but now there’s finally a tool for that called Reg2xml – Registry Export File converter.

Today I was working with a client helping them with Hummingbird eDocs DM. This piece of software have an insane amount of HKCU registry keys that needs to be applied to every user. So instead of spending a day adding these keys manually I simply purchased the software.

In the Reg2xml tool you point to the source .REG file and then click convert. From the Group Policy Management console you then select to create or edit an existing policy, navigate to Preferences and then finally drag the XML file to the Registry node.

So if you’re in the process of moving away from login scripts and have a great number of registry files the Reg2xml tool will be a huge time saver and worth every cent. The author of the tool is Mark Heitbrink – MVP Windows Server – Group Policy.

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9 thoughts on “Group Policy Management – Import registry files”

  1. A few weeks ago I was facing the exact same challenge. My company is also using Hummingbird eDocs DM. But I was forced to used a different aproach, since there was no way I would add every reg setting manually.

    I made a test user and merged the HKCU keys into that users registry hive. And used the registry wizard to import the keys. After a little cleanup process I achieved the same result. But this tool is much smoother.

    Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
    • Thanks for that link Anon. Reg2XML was a bit pricey for the rather small one-time job I needed to do. The reg2gpp link didn’t handle REG_SZ_MULTI correctly, but the rest of the registry entries was converted to XML for GPP import flawlessly. Saved me a lot of work.

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