Policies or Preference

Note: If you need to zoom in, you can click on the image.

Policies

Policies allow a system administrator to enable a setting or a rule and the computer or user has to follow it. End of story.

Preferences

Preferences allows a system administrator to set a default setting and the user has the ability to use the default setting or change it to other setting. For example, let say that there is multiple of printers located within the building, the system administrator would set a printer to be the default printer. However, the user is allowed to change their default printer since it closer to them and that setting would apply!

Demonstration

For this demonstration, I created a GPO called Go Green! in the marketing department OU. As a system administrator, I created an customized power plan that would allow us save electricity using preference. However, I give the user power to change it if they want.

User perspective:

The user has the option to choose any of these plan.

Item-Level targeting

Item-Level targeting is in the Common Tab and it allows you to set an criteria. Once a criteria is met, the preference will apply.