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Windows 10 or Windows 11 GPO ADMX - Which One To Use For Your Central Store?

hewagen's avatar
hewagen
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jan 17, 2022
  Hi community,   My name is Helmut Wagensonner. I’m a Customer Engineer at Microsoft and this blog should help you to understand, which Administrative Templates (admx) to choose for your Windo...
Updated Jul 26, 2023
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HelmutWagensonner
lforbes's avatar
lforbes
Iron Contributor
Feb 07, 2022
hewagen wrote:

 

  • Hi @ll,

     

    thanks for your feedback. Sorry for the delayed response and for not answering the questions above. I'm not part of the Windows product group so I don't know when this issue will be addressed. Anyway, I just wanted to point out that there are differences between the two ADMX versions (at the point of writing the article) but there is an "easy" workaround to get it solved. I most cases you won't even notice them because more than 99% of the settings within the ADMX are equal.

     

    But I'm with you when you say that this can cause additional "trouble" in rare cases. I ran into this issue at one of my customers as well. I will try to contact the PG to get information if this will be fixed (and when) unless it's done on purpose. I will comment here.

     

    Thanks,
    Helmut

 

Hi,
I think you need to re-write your article because it is being repeated across multiple news sources and the information it is providing is incorrect in as how it is being interpreted.

I just confirmed with multiple Domain Admins that the ADMX for Windows 11 21H2 are backwards compatible to even Windows 7 they way they have always been. 

Reading the article again I think what you are trying to say is that Microsoft released a "new version" for Windows 10 that has settings not included in their "new version" for Windows 11 which to me is a case of when two OS developers are not talking to each other. They should merge the two and fix it for sure but as about 99.9% of those settings are probably not used, it isn't a huge big deal. You can just use a preference if you need to.

You can also mix and match the ADMX files. Microsoft keeps them separately for a reason. I am still running the ADMX/ADML from Windows 7 days for the Bitlocker Encryption settings because we still use Active Directory to store and Group Policy to set Bitlocker and the newer ADMX/ADML have had the settings removed.

The only rule is to keep the ADMX and ADML matched.