Configuring Policy Settings

To configure a policy setting in a GPO, follow these steps:

1. Right-click the GPO or its associated GPO link in GPMC and select Edit to open the GPO in the Group Policy Management Editor.
2. Expand the Policies node under either Computer Configuration or User Configuration as desired.
3. Expand the Administrative Templates node under Policy and browse to select the policy you want to configure.
4. Double-click the policy setting to open its properties, then enable or disable the setting as desired, and (optionally) type a comment to document your action.
5. Click OK to apply the change to the GPO.

After Group Policy is updated for the users or computers targeted by the GPO, the policy setting will be applied. This policy setting, which applies only to Windows 7 and later versions, displays a Search The Internet link above the Start menu button whenever a user types something into the Search box on the Start menu.

In addition to using the Group Policy Management Editor to configure policy settings, you can use Windows PowerShell to do this if you have the GPMC installed on a computer running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. For example, to edit the Seattle Users GPO and enable the Add Search Internet Link To Start Menu policy setting as was done previously, open a Windows PowerShell command-prompt window and follow these steps:

1. Type Import-module GroupPolicy to import the GroupPolicy module into Windows PowerShell.
2. Type $key = "HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer" to assign the registry path for the Add Search Internet Link To Start Menu policy setting to the variable named $key.
3. Use the Set-GPRegistryValue cmdlet to create a new DWORD registry value named AddSearchInternetLinkinStartMenu under the registry key and assign a value of 1 to this registry value.

To verify that the policy setting has been modified as desired in the GPO, open the GPO in the Group Policy Management Editor and double-click the policy setting to display its properties. You can also select the GPO under the Group Policy Objects node in the GPMC and then select the Settings tab in the details pane to view details concerning all configured policy settings within the GPO.

Note To modify a policy setting using the Set-GPRegistryValue cmdlet, you need to know the registry setting associated with the policy setting. A simple way to obtain this information is to download the Group Policy Settings Reference spreadsheet for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 from the Microsoft Download Center, open it in Microsoft Office Excel, select the Administrative Templates worksheet, find the row that has the name of the policy setting under the Policy Setting Name column, and then find the registry key and value name for the policy under the Registry Information column for the selected row. Note that this spreadsheet doesn't state the value type or range of possible values of the registry value-to determine this (if it's not obvious), you can enable, disable, or otherwise configure the policy setting on a test computer and then open the registry value for the policy using Registry Editor to view the results.