Find Group Policy Settings with Group Policy Search from Microsoft

Finding a Group Policy when starting at the “is there even a setting?” ground zero can be tricky, especially in older operating systems that do not include filtering.  Microsoft has made available is a new service in the cloud viz. Group Policy Search, powered by the Windows Azure platform.

Group Policy Search

With the help of Group Policy Search, you can easily find existing Group Policies and share them with your colleagues.

Once you are on the website, you can either use the search box or filter method to find the policy. The advantage of using this tool is it is more comfortable than the inbuilt tool. Once you have the full path, you can directly navigate in the Group Policy Editor and make the changes.

How to use it:

1. In the Search box, you can see my search string “wallpaper” and below that are the search suggestions coming from the database.
2. On the lower-left corner you see the search results and the first result is automatically displayed on the right-hand side. The search phrase has been highlighted and in the GP tree, the displayed policy is marked bold.
3. Using the “Tree” menu item you can switch to the “registry view”, where you can see the corresponding registry key/value, or you can reset the whole tree to the beginning view:
4. In the “Filter” menu, you can specify which products you want to search
5. In the “Copy” menu you can select the value from the results that you want to copy.
6. In the “Settings” menu you can add the search provider and/or Connector.

It is useful when you do not have access to GPE, and you want to know what a certain policy is useful, and on which OS it is supported.

Visit the gpsearch.azurewebsites.net Group Policy Search website to get started.

Also read: How to search Group Policy for specific GPO in Windows 10.