Script to Create the ADMX Central Store

I find it amazing how many Active Directory environments I review that do not have an ADMX Central Store set up. It’s been a best practice since the release of Windows Vista/2008 some 7 years ago now. What I find is that there tends to be ADMX sprawl across management servers and even the workstations of the IT Pros, which creates challenges when determining where to edit certain GPOs from. This is just down to lack of understanding and perhaps even laziness.

This PowerShell script will create the ADMX Central Store for you by copying the ADMX files from several source locations, such as a master source on an Administrative share and/or several management servers, including IT Pro workstations.

I use to do this via a batch script using xcopy, but the batch script needed some re-work before I was prepared to share it, so I took this opportunity to re-write it using PowerShell.

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Finding Orphaned Group Policy Objects

Group Policy Objects (GPOs) are stored in two parts:

  1. GPC (Group Policy Container). The GPC is where the GPO stores all the AD-related configuration under the CN=Policies,CN=System,DC=… container, which is replicated via AD replication.
  2. GPT (Group Policy Templates). The GPT is where the GPO stores the actual settings located within SYSVOL area under the Policies folder, which is replicated by either File Replication Services (FRS) or Distributed File System (DFS).

This script will help find GPOs that are missing one of the parts, which therefore makes it an orphaned GPO.

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