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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
Jun 23, 2023

Hi,

 

So the ADMX for Windows 11 are updated INDEPENDENTLY of Windows 10 but the ADMX files are backwards compatible for both versions.

What this means is that Windows 10 has ADMX settings that are NOT included in the Windows 11 set and Windows 11 has settings that are not included in the Windows 10 set.  I think it is completely silly. Microsoft should have done as they have since Windows 2003 and had ONE set that they upgraded and that was it.

For 22H2 I did a Notepad ++ compare of the .admx (text) files between Windows 11 22H2 and Windows 10 22H2.

I used ALL of the Windows 10 22H2 ADMX/ADML with the exception of 7 ADMX/ADML from the Windows 11 set that had newer settings.

These 7 ADMX/ADML that had newer settings in the Windows 11 22H2 versions that work for both Windows 11 AND Windows 10.

On SYSVOL I added all the Windows 10 22H2 ADMX/ADML and then copied over these 7 with the Windows 11 version because they added settings, but did not remove any Windows 10 ones.

We run Windows 11 and Windows 10 and these ADMX work perfectly fine for both.

From the Windows 11 set I copied over the Windows 10 versions. They are backwards compatible so they support both
AppxPackageManager.admx / .adml
CloudContent.admx / .adml
DnsClient.admx / .adml
NewsAndInterests.admx / .adml
Sensors.admx / .adml
StartMenu. admx / .adml
Taskbar.admx / .adml