Universal Policy Administrator Documentation
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Introduction to Universal Policy Administrator

Microsoft introduced Active Directory (AD) in 2000 with its Windows 2000 Server and Desktop releases. In the last 20 plus years, the majority of enterprise customers have adopted the AD Group Policy toolsets to centrally manage and secure their Windows environments.  However, the Microsoft native tools have not kept up with the demands of the complex, changing enterprise environments.  In fact, Microsoft has announced the End-of-Life for their Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) product in 2026.

Universal Policy Administrator (UPA), is the next-generation of Group Policy change and configuration management for the next 20 years. UPA fully supports native Group Policy Objects (GPOs) while overcoming many of the challenges of using the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) and the legacy Group Policy toolsets. Its roadmap also includes expanding support to additional policy frameworks such as Microsoft Intune.

Key Features

UPA is designed to fully support your existing GPOs and related settings including ADMX’s, Preferences, registry, and third-party extensions that adhere to the Microsoft standard format. With UPA, you import your existing domains into a web-based interface and do your reporting, auditing, change management, analysis, and export from an offline console.

UPA Features

  • Web console
    • Light weight, only one location to update
    • Manage policies across Trusted and Untrusted domains/forests
  • Change Management
    • Delegation of Roles
    • Checkin/Checkout
    • Versioning, Merging, Rollback
  • Policy Analysis
    • Conflict Checking
    • Comparisons/Diffs
    • Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP)
  • Gold Policy
    • Apply across domains/forests
  • Auditing
    • User Sessions/Events
    • Search
  • Automation via PowerShell Cmdlets

UPA Benefits

  • Manage Group Policy Objects from your own offline repository
  • Centrally manage Universal Policies in untrusted domains
  • Analyze policy impact before deployment
  • Approve changes and deploy them to your environment
  • View differences between Universal Policies
  • Quickly roll back to a last known good version of a Universal Policy
  • Replicate Universal Policies from one domain to another
  • Delegate Universal Policy changes to appropriate people while limiting Active Directory permissions
  • Reporting and audit compliance

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