Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista : Creating and Using the ADMX Central Store

One benefit of using the ADMX files in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 is the option to centralize their management. ADMX files solve many issues that the legacy .adm templates created. Use of the central store makes the management of ADMX files easier and more efficient. The central store is beneficial to the management of Group Policy in the following ways:

• It centralizes management of all ADMX files.

• It allows Group Policy administrators to manage GPOs from anywhere on the network.

• It simplifies version management of updated ADMX files.

• It makes it easy to add new ADMX files so that all administrators have immediate access.

• It eliminates ADMX file version mismatch issues.

Creating the Central Store

To create a central store for ADMX files, you must have access to a domain controller as a Domain Admin. This is because the central store requires new folders to be created under the SYSVOL directory. Creation of the central store requires that a top-level folder named PolicyDefinitions be created under %systemroot%\sysvol\<domainname>\policies. This is where you will place a copy of the language-neutral ADMX files.

Best Practices

As a best practice, you should create the central store folder structure on the domain controller that controls the PDC Emulator role. This will ensure that the domain controller that Group Policy relies on is being updated first; then replication will ensure that the central store is copied to all domain controllers, because it is part of the Sysvol directory.

In addition to the PolicyDefinitions folder, you will also create additional subfolders within this folder for languages that are supported in your ADMX files. These subfolders will be used to hold the language-specific ADMX resource files, which have the extension .adml. To create these subfolders, you must use the ISO-style Language/Culture Names, which are listed in Table 1. If you needed to have two languages for your ADMX files, such as English and Spanish, you would create the following two subfolders:

%systemroot%\sysvol\<domainname>\policies\PolicyDefinitions\EN-US

%systemroot%\sysvol\<domainname>\policies\PolicyDefinitions\ES-ES

Table 1. ISO-Style Language/Culture Names

Language	Country Code
Afrikaans	AF
Arabic	AR
Basque	EU
Belarusian	BE
Bulgarian	BG
Catalan	CA
Chinese (China)	ZH, ZH-CN
Chinese (Taiwan)	ZH-TW
Croatian	HR
Czech	CS
Danish	DA
Dutch	NL
English (United Kingdom)	EN-GB
English (United States)	EN, EN-US
Estonian	ET
Faeroese	FO
Finnish	FI
French	FR, FR-FR
French (Canadian)	FR-CA
German	DE
Greek	EL
Hebrew	HE, IW
Hungarian	HU
Icelandic	IS
Indonesian	ID, IN
Italian	IT
Japanese	JA
Korean	KO
Latvian	LV
Lithuanian	LT
Neutral (use built-in word breaking)	NEUTRAL
Norwegian	NO
Polish	PL
Portuguese	PT
Portuguese (Brazil)	PT-BR
Romanian	RO
Russian	RU
Serbian	SR
Slovak	SK
Slovenian	SL
Spanish	ES, ES-ES
Swedish	SV
Thai	TH
Turkish	TR
Ukrainian	UK
Vietnamese	VI

Copying ADMX and ADML Files to the Central Store

After you manually create the PolicyDefinitions folder and the appropriate language-specific subfolders, you must copy the ADMX files to the central store. There is no user interface for performing this task, so you must manually copy the files into the relative folders.

If you had all of the correct ADMX files on the Windows Vista workstation from which you were administering Group Policy, you would perform the copy of the files by following these steps:

1. Click Start, and then click Run.

2. In the Run dialog box, type cmd in the Open box. The Command Prompt appears.

3. Type xcopy%systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\* %logonserver%\sysvol\ %userdnsdomain%\policies\PolicyDefinitions\ .

You must then copy all of the ADMX language resource files, ADML files, to the central store, under the correct subfolder for that language. If you needed to do this for both English and Spanish, for example, you would use these commands:

xcopy %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\EN-US\*
%logonserver%\sysvol\%userdnsdomain%\policies\PolicyDefinitions\EN-US\

and

xcopy %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\ES-ES\*
%logonserver%\sysvol\%userdnsdomain%\policies\PolicyDefinitions\ES-ES\

Note

If you want to use a free tool to help with the creation of the central store, visit http://www.gpoguy.com/cssu.htm. This simple utility creates the central store folder and copies the ADMX and ADML files into it for you.

How It Works: ADMX File Usage

By default, computers running Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 use the local ADMX files, from the C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions folder, whether you are editing the local GPO or a GPO that is stored in Active Directory directory service.

If you create the central store on the domain controllers, the ADMX files from the central store are used. The two locations are not merged, so if there are local ADMX files that are not in the central store, they will not be used.

If you want to include custom ADMX files, you must copy them either to the local PolicyDefinitions folder or to the central store located on the domain controllers. When these custom ADMX files are available in the PolicyDefinitions folder, the settings will appear in the Group Policy Management Editor when you edit a GPO.