I have not yet had need to worik with adding Aministrative Templates to 2008 R2 domains before - until recently, all the default stuff that comes with 2008 R2 was enough.
I have a domain-wide GPO set under User Config > Policies > Windows Settings > Internet Explorer Maintenance to provide some company-standard URLs under Favorites. Today I went to edit them and found that the IE Maintenance option is gone form this GPO.Also we just put IE 10 on these systems maybe a week or so ago and from what I've read, putting IE10 in the mix is what made this IE Maintenance GPO option disappear and there's no way to get it back.
I'm still reading about how to handle this but so far I gather my best choice is to find some IE10 admx file. I've never worked with admx files before. Right now I'm reading through a few documents:
Using Administrative Templates (a subsection of Technet's IE 10 deployment documentation)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj822355.aspx
Managing Group Policy ADMX Files Step-by-Step Guide
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709647.aspx
I'm not done reading either of these but already one question comes up. In the Using Admin Temmplates document it says the following:
You can create a central store that provides all administrators who edit domain-based Group Policy Objects (GPOs) access to the same set of Administrative Template files. The central store is an administrator-created folder on SYSVOL that provides a single centralized storage location for all Administrative Template files (ADMX and ADML) for the domain. Once you create the central store, the Group Policy tools use only the ADMX files in the central store and ignore ADMX versions stored locally. The central store is optional; if you do not create it, the Group Policy tools use the local ADMX files. The root folder for the central store must be namedPolicyDefinitions (that is, %SystemRoot%\SYSVOL\domain\policies\PolicyDefinitions). For more information about creating a central store, seeScenario 1: Editing the Local GPO Using ADMX Files.
First, I would think any organization would prefer to hvae all this stuff centralized so why this is optional is beyond me, but as I said I'm new to this stuff. But what confuses me is whether or not I should do this central store. My concern is that if I create it, what if upgrading some future version of IE introduces a new admx file that I don't know about (or any patch or other upgrade other than IE causing need for a new admx) and places it in the local PolicyDefinitions folder of the domain controller. I don't know how to be notified of when a new admx file is needed so as I see it, the product (IE in this case) will get updated, but since I don't know about a need for an admx file, GPO breaks because I didn't think to put a new admx in the central store. This method of management doens't sound ideal to me.
Cna anybody advise on what is the best practice here? Thank you.