Quick Fix : Update SBS2011 Essentials Windows 7 Pro Pack for Windows 8

Nice title for a post, hopefully the SEO on that one will kick in.

Had a question come into one of my mailboxes about the Windows 7 Pro Pack and making the GPOs apply to Windows 8.

If you recall, SBS 2011 Essentials launched an Addin to push out some preconfigured GPOs to clients for security settings and folder redirection. I covered the WMI filters in a post about how to extend that functionality to Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Running a GPResult /R on a Win8 client, we can see that our custom GPOs that use WMI filters, are not being applied.

It is a very simple change to a WMI filter to make this work.

First on our Win8 machine we can run a command to confirm the OS version.

Get-WMIObject W32_OperatingSystem

You can see that the value for OS Version is 6.2

Moving over to our Essentials server, we can open the GPMC and find out WMI Filter.

We can then simply edit the query string from:

Select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where Version like “6.1%” and ProductType = ”1”

To:

Select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where Version >= “6.1%” and ProductType = ”1”

Now we can run a GPUpdate /Force on our Win8 machine, and sure enough, our policies are now applied.

Of course you could just create a new WMI filter, and another set of GPOs just to apply to the Windows 8 machines if you wanted to.

Hope that is useful.