1.1.2 Group Policy Settings

There are two types of policy settings, as follows:

User policy settings: These specify capabilities and behaviors for interactively logged-on users. These settings can also affect different users who are logged on to the same computer. Examples of such settings include the user's default location for saving documents, or the desktop background image for a user.

Some settings affect users regardless of the computer that they log on to. For example, policy source mode, as described in [MS-GPOL] section 3.2.1.2, can override user policy settings by causing computer policy settings to be applied to the user.

Computer policy settings: These specify capabilities and behaviors for individual computers, even when no users are logged on. Computer policy settings can also globally affect every user who logs on to the computer. Examples include policy settings that enable a computer to host a web server, schedule automated disk backups of the computer, or specify a standard web home page for all users of the computer.

The Group Policy: Core Protocol enables Group Policy clients to discover and retrieve these policy settings. The policy settings that are applied to the Group Policy client depend on the filtered GPO list, which is derived and prioritized by the core Group Policy engine on the Group Policy client. The filtered GPO list is a set of GPOs that have passed various test criteria to verify whether they are permitted or denied applicability on the Group Policy client, as specified in [MS-GPOL] section 3.2.1.5.

The application of Group Policy settings to the Group Policy client is discussed further in section 1.1.7 and an example with message sequences is provided in section 3.2.