Do you know the free Microsoft tool GPinventory? I only installed it now, after reading an article about it at WindowsITPro (subscribers only). GPInventory is very useful if you have to monitor Group Policy Objects (GPOs) deployment in a larger network. In addition, you can use it to gather many interesting information about the computers in your network using WMI queries.

After playing a while with this tool, I started to like it. The most interesting feature is its ability to track the rollout of GPOs. You can check which computers in an Active Directory Domain received certain GPOs. You can export the data to an XML or text file. The latter can be imported to Excel. It is possible to start the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) tool from GPInventory to scan a certain computer and see what Policies are active.

The scanning process of GPInventory might take a while depending on the number of computers in your network. This is especially true if many computers are offline.

This is the description from the Microsoft web page:

Typical usage scenarios

RSOP Queries:

• Do a software inventory for users and computers in a domain or OU
• See which applications are installed on computers in the domain
• Track the rollout of new GPOs on a domain
• Find computers that have not downloaded and applied new GPOs

WMI Queries:

• Do a complete hardware inventory (processor, memory, hard disk space, etc) for all computers in the domain
• Scan all computers to see if a particular hotfix is applied
• See the amount of disk space that is available on computers
• Test a WMI filter before implementing it in the domain