The Group Policy Route to Office Deployment and Management

Some Configurations Require Third Parties
The Office Administrative Templates let you exert much control over your Office deployments. However, not all configuration capabilities are supported. For example, the most common configuration request is to have the ability to pre-create Microsoft Outlook profiles with the email server options that you want your users to have the first time they launch Outlook. Unfortunately, this basic setup isn't supported in any versions of the Office Administrative Templates. For that reason, you have to rely on third-party vendors for help. Several vendors provide products that extend Group Policy's native capabilities to add advanced Office configuration support, including DesktopStandard's PolicyMaker Standard Edition (now part of Microsoft), Quest Software's Group Policy Extensions for Desktops, and ScriptLogic's Desktop Authority. ScriptLogic's product lets you control Outlook profiles outside of Group Policy. Both DesktopStandard's product and Quest's product are implemented as extensions to Group Policy, letting you use your existing Group Policy infrastructure to deploy the Outlook configuration I mentioned earlier as well as other configuration scenarios not supported by the Office Administrative Templates.

With Group Policy Software Installation for Office deployment and Office Administrative Templates to lock down the behavior of various Office applications for your users, you can ease the burden of managing what has historically been a large and complicated software suite. And, if you throw third-party products into the mix, there's almost nothing you can't do to manage your Office users.

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