Frequently Asked Question
Group Policies when applied via the Group Policy Editor for all users, or the Group Policy Objects Editor for specific users and groups can be extremely powerful, especially in a Non-Domain environment which is high security with no domain involvement, or sideways permission creep.
However, unlike AD, once you have a set of policies that work well, deploying them is a little harder, but not much. You can use your favourite endpoint manager like Intune, but yet again, in a high security environment, poking holes in firewalls for Microsoft Cloud applications is generally a no-no.
We are going to be using the LGPO tool, which is part of the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit. You will need to download it from here first:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=55319
Link death is a common issue with M$ links so if the link is dead, search for the Microsoft Security Complaince Toolkit, or LGPO and you should find it. For convenience, GEN Mirrors the LGPO tool in our downloads section under Tools (Search LGPO).
Now, we have the tool in a folder .\Downloads\LGPO\LGPO_30 (this path might vary slightly, but for the current version this is correct).
Now we CD (change directory) into that folder
Then we create a directory called C:\GEN --- it can be anything but we're using that.
Now we EXPORT your policies using the /b (for backup) flag as shown.
The entire policy tree is backed up into C:\GEN. Zip that up or copy to a USB stick or host on a network share as needed.
On the destination machine, create a restore point --- not essential just a good idea at least for the first one or two until you're confident of the process, and your policies.
We're going to assume, on the destination machine you've copied it back into C:\GEN, if not, simply change the path in the LGPO command and restore with...
Then we run the gpupdate /force to make sure this newly restored policy is applied.
