How to avoid getting tripped up by Group Policy settings.

A customer I know wanted to block users from browsing the network, so they enabled the following two Group Policy settings found under User ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesWindows ComponentsWindows Explorer:

No computers near me in my network places

No entire network in my network places

After doing this, they discovered that users could still use UNC paths to access network shares directly. Why? Because these Group Policy settings did exactly what they were supposed to do, not what the customer actually wanted i.e. disable network browsing. Moral of the story? Read the description of a Group Policy setting carefully before you enable it so that you know what it will actually do!

Article written by MyComputerAid.com