Updated: July 9, 2020 (October 23, 2006)

Acquisition Bolsters Group Policy

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

Windows management tool vendor DesktopStandard has been acquired by Microsoft for an undisclosed sum. DesktopStandard offers a line of computer management tools that exploit Group Policy, the Windows service for centralized configuration of user and computer settings and applications. The buy will probably strengthen the coverage and reliability of Group Policy, but sharpens competition for other vendors of Group Policy extensions.

Change Management, Extensions for Group Policy

Based in Portsmouth, NH, and formerly known as AutoProf, DesktopStandard claimed 3,500 customers and 4 million managed computers as of June 2006. Microsoft gains three main product lines in the acquisition:

GPOVault, which implements Group Policy change control features including auditing, rollback of changes, and delegation of permissions over individual Group Policy settings
PolicyMaker, a set of Group Policy extensions for managing Outlook profiles, mapped drives, environment variables, and many other types

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