RSAT & GP Cmdlets

This post was written by Judith, a technical writer for Group Policy. This will be the first post in a series on ways to use Powershell with Group Policy

I wanted to play around with the Group Policy cmdlets. These are installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 automatically when Group Policy is installed. But what I really wanted to do was use them on my Windows 7 client machine where I do most of my Group Policy administration.

I installed RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools) for Windows 7, I now had access to the Group Policy cmdlets on my Windows 7 client.

So, instead of having to remote into my Windows Server 2008 R2 server directly or try to use the remoting built into Windows PowerShell, I can install RSAT and then use the GP cmdlets in the same way I would on Server 2008 R2.

Once RSAT is installed, I can open a Windows PowerShell command window and find out the Windows PowerShell modules that I can use with the command get-module -listavailable

    PS C:\> get-module -listavailable

    ModuleType     Name                 ExportedCommands

    ------------------------------

    Manifest     ActiveDirectory     {}

    Manifest     AppLocker             {}

    Manifest     BitsTransfer         {}

    Manifest     GroupPolicy         {}

    Manifest     PSDiagnostics         {}

    Manifest     TroubleshootingPack {}

Then I can import the Group Policy module to make all the GP cmdlets available within my Windows PowerShell window with the command import-module GroupPolicy 

And a scripting we will go…