.pol can not see windows settings/security settings

[bezik46]

.pol opens fine, but can not see what is configured in GPO under Policies/Windows settings/Security settings

[Fleex255]

Indeed, Policy Plus is currently designed only for ADMX-guided policy settings, i.e. those under the Administrative Templates branch. UI support for other kinds of policies is probably a long way off, but for what it's worth, the corresponding Registry entries (if the settings are Registry-based at all) are shown in Edit Raw POL. It might be possible for someone to write ADMX files that correspond to a few of the Security Settings, especially Security Options.

[Lewis8379]

Related question, if I made some edits in PolicyPlus, and some Security Settings edits in the standard Group Policy software, would exporting and importing to another computer using PolicyPlus also copy those Security Settings edits?

[Fleex255]

Yes, if:

• The Security Settings you changed are Registry-based (you can check whether File | Edit Raw POL shows entries with relevant-looking value names), and
• You export and import the policies as a POL file (rather than Semantic Policy, which can only express ADMX-guided policies)

[Lewis8379]

Thanks for the reply. I've just tried changing "Enforce password history" under Computer > Windows > Security > Account > Password, which was a random choice, from 0 to 1. This is not shown under Edit Raw POL > Computer, which is blank.

So in these cases where they are not Administrative Templates, or Registry based, is it not possible to copy/export these policies across at all? Thanks.

[Fleex255]

Unfortunately Policy Plus cannot currently handle policies that are not POL/Registry-based, sorry.

However, there may be other tools that can work with the security policies. While I have not tried it myself, Microsoft's secedit utility looks promising.

[Dragodraki]

Thanks for mention. Yes, it would a great improvement if policies from secpol.msc would be displayed too, like all other policies - including filtering them.

Context: The editing in PolicyPlus does not differ much from the Windows GUI in Pro version for my taste. What the app makes so unique and amazing to me is the filter ability to filter (besides using it in home version too). If you select the registry "HKLM" and "HKCU" as ressource and filter for "configured" policies only, one can see all that ones are applied to the system already. In case of problems this will significantly reduce time to narrow down the issue for administrators (for example when Bitdefender uninstall does not unlock Windows Updates management again like before). Searching all policies on the off chance is tiresome for local users already but the hell on earth for active directory policies, especially if they are done by registry cause they are invisible to Windows own gpedit.msc.