Creating and Managing Groups

Groups are an important part of network management. Many administrators are able to accomplish the majority of their management tasks through the use of groups; they rarely assign permissions to individual users.

Windows 7 includes built-in local groups, such as Administrators and Backup Operators. These groups already have all the permissions needed to accomplish specific tasks. Windows 7 also uses default special groups, which are managed by the system. Users become members of special groups based on their requirements for computer and network access.

You can create and manage local groups through the Local Users and Groups utility. With this utility, you can add groups, change group membership, rename groups, and delete groups.

One misconception with groups is that they have to work with Group Policy Objects (GPOs). This is not correct. GPOs are a set of rules that allow you to set computer configuration and user configuration options that apply to users or computers. Group Policies are typically used with Active Directory and are applied as GPOs.

In the following sections, you will learn about groups and all the built-in groups. Then you will learn how to create and manage these groups.