Adding Administrative Templates for GPO

Scenario

Several users have complained that they have found several emails in their Junk Email folders within Outlook.

They already have a hosted email filtering solution that sends a daily quarantine digest to each user. When they release the quarantined emails, they sometimes go into Outlook’s Junk Email folder, so it seems the email has not been released. Users are unhappy.

You need to find a way of globally disabling Outlook’s Junk Email filtering. Enter custom Administrative Templates.

Solution

  1. Download the relevant Administrative Templates here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=18968
  2. Unzip the file to a temp folder:
  3. You can delete the Admin folder, as it contains .opax files which are not needed in this case; they are used with the Office Customisation Tool:
  4. Within the ADMX folder, you can safely delete any language files you don’t need. This will save plenty of disk space over time:
  5. Your ADMX folder should now look like this:
  6. The en-us folder contains the English language .adml files:
  7. Navigate to your Central Store for your Group Policy Administrative Templates. Eg. C:\Windows\SYSVOL_DFSR\domain\Policies\PolicyDefinitions. (If you can’t find C:\Windows\SYSVOL_DFSR, it’s because you haven’t upgraded your SYSVOL replication from NTFRS to DFSR.
  8. Copy the relevant .admx files to C:\Windows\SYSVOL_DFSR\domain\Policies\PolicyDefinitions:
  9. Copy the matching .adml files to C:\Windows\SYSVOL_DFSR\domain\Policies\PolicyDefinitions\en-US:
  10. Create a new Group Policy Object (GPO) and edit it to see the new Administrative Template:
  11. The Junk Email setting can be found under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates Microsoft Outlook 2010 > Outlook Options > Preferences > Junk E-mail > Junk E-mail protection level:
  12. Select Enabled, then No Protection from the drop-down menu:
  13. You should now find the Junk Email filtering disabled on your clients:

Classic Administrative Templates

You may have also noticed the unzipped ADM folder earlier:

The .adm files (within a language folder eg. en-us) can also be used for Administrative Templates.

You add these using the Group Policy Management Editor like so:

  1. Edit a new or existing GPO.
  2. Expand User Configuration > Policies.
  3. Right-click Administrative Templates and select Add/Remove Templates:
  4. Click Add and navigate to the .adm files:
  5. These will now show under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Classic Administrative Templates (ADM):

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