Managing Users’ Options with System Policies

Applying System Policies to Selected Users or Groups

You determine which users or groups are affected by a system policy. You can set policies for a single user, for a group of users, or for all users. You can also set policies for a single computer or for all computers. You make these choices in the System Policy Editor when you create a system policy file.

The Office 2000 policies you create and distribute are stored as entries in the HKEY_Current_User\Software\Policies subkey in the Windows registry.

Setting system policies for all users or all computers

You can set a policy for all of the users in your domain by double-clicking the Default User icon in the System Policy Editor. You can also set a policy for all client computers in your domain by double-clicking the Default Computer icon. When you double-click one of these icons, the Properties dialog box opens, and you can set the policies for that user or computer. You can set a policy for all users, for all computers, or for both.

Note   The full name of the Properties dialog box changes depending on the name of the icon you double-click in the main window of the System Policy Editor. The dialog box is referred to generically in this section as the "Properties dialog box."

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Setting system policies for a particular user or computer

You can set a policy for a specific user account by adding the user to the policy file. For example, suppose that your network includes a Guest account and you want to limit a guest user’s access to options. You can use a system policy for the Guest account. Similarly, if all your guest users can use the same computer, you can set a policy for that computer.

Note   The user name or computer name you specify in the System Policy Editor must already exist in the network system. You cannot create new user names or computer names from within the System Policy Editor.

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Setting system policies for a group of users

You can also set policies for groups of users in your domain. For example, all of the users in your Accounting department may require the same options in Excel. If you create a Windows NT user group for the Accounting department, you can control the options for all users in Accounting by setting a policy for the Accounting group.

Note   The group names you specify in the System Policy Editor must already exist in the network system. You cannot create new groups from within the System Policy Editor.

Sometimes a user is a member of more than one group. To avoid potential conflicts between group policies, you can set relative priorities so that group policies are applied in a particular order. When a user who is a member of several groups logs on, the policy settings from the highest priority group are processed last so that those settings override the settings from lower priority groups.

Note   You must set group policies by installing the group policy capability on each client computer. For more information about group policies, see the Windows NT Server Resource Kit or the Windows NT Workstation Resource Kit.

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See also

The System Policy Editor provides a single interface for setting policies for users, groups, or computers. For detailed instructions, see How to Set System Policies for Your Organization.