IT Interview Questions: What are administrative templates?

Information Technology (IT) Interview Questions and Answers

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IT Interview Questions: What are administrative templates?

Administrative templates, (or .adm files), enable administrators to control registry settings using Group Policy. These settings appear under the Administrative Templates folder for both user configuration and computer configuration in the console tree of the Group Policy Object Editor, and in HTML reports produced by GPMC.

It is important to understand that .adm files are not the actual settings that are deployed to client operating systems. The .adm file is simply a template file (implemented as text file with an .adm extension) that provides the friendly name for the setting and an explanation. This template file is used to populate the user interface. The settings that are deployed to clients are contained in the registry.pol file inside the GPO. On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, each registry setting contains a "Supported on" tag that indicates which operating system versions support that policy setting. If a setting is specified and deployed to a client operating system that does not support that setting, the settings are ignored. These .adm files are stored in two locations by default: inside GPOs, and in the %windir%\inf folder on the local computer.

Windows includes a predefined set of Administrative template files that define the registry settings that can be configured in a Group Policy object (GPO). The .adm files can be added or removed from the Group Policy Object Editor by right-clicking Administrative Templates and clicking Add/Remove Templates . Adding or removing .adm files does not affect which policies are processed by the Group Policy engine. It only affects whether a specific Administrative Template policy setting is displayed in the Group Policy Object Editor. For example, if you removed all the .adm files from the GPO via the Add/Remove Templates dialog box, no Administrative Template policy settings would be displayed under the Administrative Templates node. This will not affect the policies already stored in the Registry.pol file.

Administrative Template Description
System.adm System settings Inetres.adm Internet Explorer settings Wmplayer.adm Windows Media Player settings. This tool is not available on Windows XP 64-Bit Edition and the 64-bit versions of the Windows Server 2003 family. Conf.adm NetMeeting settings. This tool is not available on Windows XP Professional, 64-Bit Edition and the 64-bit versions of the Windows Server family. Wuau.adm Windows Update settings.

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