Group Policy is a feature of the Windows operating system that lets you define company-wide rules that are applied to all accounts and machines in an organisation. For example, your company can use a ruleset in a Group Policy Object (GPO) to prevent you from accepting third-party cookies in your browser or set the location of your home directory to somewhere else than C:\Users\yourname.
When everything works as it should, you do not need to know anything about them. However, when things go wrong you better know at least the two commands I explain in this post.
Forcing an update
Windows should do all the necessary updates on its own in the background. If everything works, the new Group Policy Objects will be applied as soon as possible, and you may not even notice a difference. When you depend on a specific GPO, then the story looks different. You may not be able to work without that change and therefore need a way to expedite the update. In this case you can start CMD (the Command Prompt) in the administrator mode and type this command :
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gpupdate /force |
You should get an output similar to this one:
Updating Policy…
User Policy update has completed successfully.
Computer Policy update has completed successfully.
You now forced an update of the Group Policy and should therefore have the desired GPO installed as well.
Is the GPO on my machine?
Sometimes a GPO may not be installed even when you force an update. That can happen when the server you get the Group Policy from does not know about that specific GPO (yet).
To know what Group Policy Objects are installed on your machine, you can enter this command into CMD (again in administrator mode):
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gpresult /r |
In the long output you need to find the section called “Applied Group Policy Objects” and look for the GPO you are interested in. If it is there, it is installed. Otherwise you may need to force another gpupdate.
Restart
Installing a group policy does not yet mean that it is active. You most likely need to log-out and log-in to get it activated. This may be a good opportunity to restart your computer to ensure that no running process prevents the GPO from getting activated.
Conclusion
Group Policy is a powerful tool to manage an organisation. As long as everything works, you may not even know that they are there. If something goes wrong, it is good to know the two commands gpupdate and gpresult. It may save you a lot of time figuring out what is going on and you may be able to fix it quickly.