Office 2007 and Group Policy Control

By Greg Shields

We administrators often deal with Microsoft Office in a relatively unmanaged state. Office's installation routine allows for the component-wise installation of just those pieces you want your users to use. But once the installation is complete, controlling its configuration wasn't something we often concerned ourselves with.

But that doesn't need to be the case. For the latest versions of Office, Microsoft has released a set of pre-generated Group Policy Administrative Templates that allow you to lock down, centrally control, and otherwise manage the configuration of your Office installations. If you haven't incorporated these templates into your regular Group Policy management, you're losing out on the ability to control virtually every facet of Office.

For Office 2007, these Administrative Templates are located at the Web site: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=78161. Downloading them provides you with 15 ADM files that contain plenty of configurable and controllable settings within the Office suite.
Getting down into very detailed settings, these Administrative Templates enable control of things like default save location and file types all the way down to nitpicky items like "Disable the Free/Busy item in the person name Smart Tag menu." Whew!

Templates are available not only for the traditional Office components like Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook, but also for newer services like the Outlook Calendar Printing Assistant, Groove client, Office Communicator, OneNote and SharePoint. Publisher, Visio, InfoPath, and Project get similar attention.

In a bizarre twist within a Microsoft world of ADMX files, the Office 2007 Administrative Templates all arrive as old-school ADM files, which means you won't be adding these templates to your Central Store.

The easiest way to use them is to copy them to the C:\Windows\Inf folder on the computer where you plan to use the Group Policy Management Console. Once there, the GPMC will automatically add the templates into each GPO you edit.