I know this is somewhat old news, but I really like it. Group Policy Preferences is a new (ish) extension to Group Policy provided on Active Directory domains that allows some cool stuph to happen. My favorite part, and from what I can judge, most administrators’ favorite part is the ability to map printers and drives without scripts. My company has been rolling out Server 2008 and 2008 R2 for all new projects, and I have to say, we are quite pleased with Group Policy Preferences. This is something that should have been present since Windows NT days – it just makes sense. Why write a script and run it in full view of users when the client OS can simply take it’s instructions from the domain policy and just do it.

No more Batch files or VB Scripts. No more KiXstart scripts. Just clean mapping of printers and drives when you log in, based on your organizational or group membership. Finally, some magic comes to Windows that actually makes sense.