Intro to Working with Universal Policies

A Universal Policy (UP) is an offline policy stored in a Microsoft SQL database.  A UP contains GPO data and related settings.  Once a GPO is imported into UPA or created from scratch, here are the types of operations that can be performed on it:

• Create and Edit Policy Settings
• Checkin
• Checkout
• Merge
• Revert
• Rollback
• Report
• Identify Policy Conflicts
• Identify Policy Differences
• Synchronize across Policies/Domains/Forests
• Replicate across Domains
• Link to Organizational Units
• View the history of Events
• Generate a Resultant Set of Policies (RSoP) Report

Policy Workflow

After importing a GPO from Active Directory or creating a new Universal Policy, a typical workflow for a Universal Policy includes the following:

You will have different users for the various steps in the workflow.  Please see the Administration section for setting up the various personas.

Here’s a video overview of working with an imported GPO and creating a new Universal Policy and exporting it to Active Directory: