Active Directory Script Highlight: Pre-Migration Group Policy Inventory and Cleanup

Todays Active Directory cleanup topic looks at Group Policy Objects.  In most of the environments I have prepared for migrations, old Group Policy objects are another problem area that should be cleaned up before an Active Directory migration. In many cases, as organizations are brought into the fold of another company, some of the OU structure is maintained until full integration can happen at a later date. In this case, maintaining the active Group Policies to preserve user and computer object settings, limiting the number of changes during this transition, is important.  Finding the group policies that are active is the trick.  The example below will give you a good base understanding of the migrating organization or your current Group Policy structure to enable you to clean up potentially stale Group Policies objects.

Sometimes the simplest scripts and get you a long way.  Today’s Group Policy identification script is a basic inventory of what you have for Group Policies with their creation time and last modified time.

 

Get-GPO -All | sort displayname |ft displayname, creationtime, modificationtime –a

Looking for Group Polices that were created a long time ago and not modified in a while could signal the first pass a what could be targeted for removal.  Working together with the administrators of the organization being migrated on this list of Group Policy Objects will likely reveal more that could be removed allowing you to focus on only active Group Policies slated for migration or cutting some of the fat and making your Active Directory a little leaner.