Mastering Windows Group Policy

Administrative Templates

The policy settings that are available to choose from out of the box in Group Policy are lumped together into folders visible inside the Group Policy Management Editor (GPME). If you expand either Computer Configuration | Policies or User Configuration | Policies, you will see three folders called Software Settings, Windows Settings, and Administrative Templates. Actually, that last one is officially called Administrative Templates: Policy definitions (ADMX files) retrieved from the local computer. That's a bit of a mouthful, but the name of that folder reflects the reason why we treat the settings inside Administrative Templates a little bit differently than the other policy settings.