AD Security Filtering and Item Level Targeting, apply specific policies to specific resources.

Let’s talk Active Directory again, AD for short. In my opinion is an IT administrators best friend. It has the potential to eliminate the need for log on scripts, it can simplify software deployments to multiple computers, improve security, and eliminate malware. If you’re an IT admin in a small shop or new to the Admin game and haven’t really employed AD on your network beside the default domain policy, I suggest you have a look into it.

What does Security Filtering and Item Level Targeting do exactly? Well they allow you to apply Group Policies to individual users, computers or groups.

Security Filtering is a basic way of filtering out to which group the policy is applied to. For instance, when one creates a new Group Policy Object in Active Directory, by default the GPO applies to Authenticated Users. So any user that logs on to the domain or rather is authenticated by the domain, and exists in the OU where the GPO resides, will have said policy applied when they log in. Now, let’s say you want to limit this to a specific set of users. Perhaps someone in the Accounting department, they might have a specific drive or access to a drive that you want them to have mapped when they log on. This is easy to accomplish with Security Filtering. Please be aware that Security Filtering is not the only way to restrict or grant access to specific network resources, not at all. There are several ways to approach this, some more complicated than others, this is merely just one of those ways.

The benefit of Security Filtering is that you will omit any users, security groups, or computers that are not in this list. It also gives you a somewhat greater control, such as allowing you to set the read write permissions on each group in the policy. Security Filtering is a top level filter, during log on AD will check to see if you are part of said resource and if you are not no further checks will be performed against this policy. The draw back is that no further checks will be performed against this policy, so for for instance if you have a policy that maps various network drives to people in different departments and the drives differ per department you’d have to create new policies for each department. Note: Some people prefer to have separate policies per department, and organize theirs just like this. This method works well for large organizations that need to visually separate policies.

Insert Item level Targeting, it is a nested form of filtering within a specific Active Directory policy. This is where you can have your entire filtering done inside the policy. Perfect for your smaller offices or filtering resources per department. On my network I use Item Level targeting to target specific groups which users are members of to map special drives on their computers. 

I don’t have that many users that I support and this is a viable solution to me. For larger scale organizations and to be more transparent with your policies use Security Filtering.

There are many ways to filter groups, users, and computer these are just a couple that are useful.

Side Note: You can also use WMI filters to filter group policies based on specific hardware resources. WMI filters need to be created in the Group Policy Management editor. WMI filters can be created and applied a GPO based on computer attributes, such as the OS, free space, brand, or model. This is perfect if you want to deploy drivers and software to specific machines on your network or range of machines without wanting to add them to a specific group.