GPO and mass depoloyment

[IMTheNachoMan]

I saw a previous issue but it was from 2016 so I thought I should create a new one.

Does BrowserChooser2 support GPOs for deployment and auto-rule management?

The idea being that BC2 would be deployed to thousands of computers and GPO would enforce some priority auto-rules and then user's could create/add their own.

[guy]

Right now, no. I would have to research on how to add GPOs. I can see the usefulness but also the problems.

The biggest issue is all the settings are in one file. There are ways around it.

Another question is, what can the user change / delete.

[IMTheNachoMan]

Yes, I don't know how BC2 is coded but I assume you'd have to make code changes to look for settings in different places: one in GPO (system wide, admin enforced) and one in some user config file.

The way I would think it would work is:

• Admin could set GPO for locked settings that the user cannot change or over-ride
• Admin could set pre-loaded user-configs that the user could modify (or remove)
• User could set user-configs that would be lower priority over the GPO ones

And no issues if you cannot add this feature. Google Chrome has some tool that does something similar that might work for my place of work.

[Nico]

Hello

I'm in the process of deploying BrowserChooser2 in our network as well. As for GPO Configuration. The easiest way would be if you switch from the config File to the Registry. There is GP Preferences which makes manipulating the Registry with GPO's pretty easy, so no need to create an ADMX File on that side.

Let me know if you want to develop in this direction, and if you need any help regarding GPO/Registry. I'm a client Engineer, I've deployed many applications to users, but I don't really have programming skills.

And a big thanks for creating BC2. If we succeed with it, I'll ask my boss if we can do a donation. Regards, Nico

[guy]

Adding it as registry keys is certainly an interesting way to do it. It relatively simple to handle RegKeys.

I can't ditch the config file easily as it's deeply embed in the code.

Any ideas on making this more GPO friendly are welcome. I should be able to work on this in the next few weekends.

[guy]

I have started on the process of adding settings via Registry Keys. It will take a while to complete. I have one object created (URLs) and already running into complications. I will have to write and 'export' function to help creating all the required keys - there are lots of them.