What issues or considerations should we have if we currently use a GPO to push Outlook settings? Microsoft provides an administrative template for managing many settings of Outlook, but we don’t know if this can impact profile updates using your tools.
Outlook Profile settings:
Outlook stores its settings in the registry, specifically in HKEY_CURRENT_USER.
The Outlook admin template that can be used with a GPO essentially manages these settings. However, in order to ensure that the policy is in effect and authoritative, after the changes are made, user access to these parts of the settings are blocked.
Profile Updates with ProfileManager.exe:
The ProfileManager application does update the registry directly to manage profile settings. However, since the ProfileManager must run as the user (given the registry section in which they reside), the restrictions that are placed by a GPO are in effect when then ProfileManager executes. As such, profile updates can fail when a GPO exists to manage profiles since the update cannot modify those sections. GPOs that manage Outlook profiles must be disabled before attempting to use the ProfileManager.exe. Note that the enforcement by the GPO only needs to be removed; there is no requirement to “undo” the changes that a GPO may have made to a user’s Outlook profile. As long as the user is able to modify the outlook profile the ProfileManager will be able to do its work.
