Where did my Group Policy templates go?

Question

I was just trying to solve an Office-related problem by importing the Office 2010 Administrative Template files into my ADMX Central Store (SYSVOL\Policies\PolicyDefinitions), now all of the "normal" group policy templates are gone.

Why did they disappear and how do I get them back?

Answer 1

To put the new ADMX files into your Central Store, you most likely created a folder similar to

\\domain.example.com\SYSVOL\domain.example.com\Policies\PolicyDefinitions

Then, you placed the .admx files inside it.

The existence of the Policies folder is not an indicator of a previously existing Central Store. By creating the PolicyDefinitions you've basically created said Central Store.

When no Central Store exists, the group policy management console will display the group policy templates that are stored locally on the machine. These can be found in %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions.

Once a Central Store exists, group policy templates will be loaded exclusively from there, the local policy templates are ignored.

You can now either load them manually when editing a group policy object (Right-click Administrative Templates, Add/remove templates, select the .admx files from %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions), or simply populate your Central Store with the local templates:

1. Open a command window: click Start, click Run, then type cmd.

2. To copy all the language-neutral ADMX files from your Windows Vista administrative workstation to the central store on your domain controller using the xcopy command, type:

    xcopy %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\* %logonserver%\sysvol\%userdnsdomain%\policies\PolicyDefinitions\
   

3. To copy all ADMX language resource files from your Windows Vista administrative workstation to the central store on your domain controller using the xcopy command, type:

    xcopy %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\EN-US\* %logonserver%\sysvol\%userdnsdomain%\policies\PolicyDefinitions\EN-US\