What Is the Central Store?

What Is the Central Store?

If your organization has multiple administration workstations, there could be potential issues when editing GPOs. If you do not have a central store that contains the template files, then the workstation from which you are editing will use the .admx (ADMX) and .adml (ADML) files that are stored in the local PolicyDefinitons folder. If different administration workstations have different operating systems or are at different service pack levels, there might be differences in the ADMX and ADML files. For example, the ADMX and ADML files that are stored on a workstation running Windows 7 with no service pack installed might not be the same as the files that are stored on a domain controller running Windows Server 2012. This could lead to administrators not seeing the same settings in a GPO.

The central store addresses this issue. The central store provides a single point from which administration workstations can download the same ADMX and ADML files when editing a GPO. The central store is detected automatically by Windows operating systems (Windows Vista or newer or Windows Server 2008 or newer). Because of this automatic behavior, the local workstation that the administrator uses to perform administration always checks to see if a central store exists before loading the local ADMX and ADML files in the Group Policy Management Editor window. When the local workstation detects a central store, it then downloads the template files from there. In this way, there is a consistent administration experience among multiple workstations.

Creating and Provisioning the Central Store

You must create and provision the central store manually. First you must create a folder on a domain controller, name the folder PolicyDefinitions, and store the folder at C:\Windows\SYSVOL\sysvol \{Domain Name}\Policies\. This folder is now your central store. You must then copy all the contents of the C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions folder to the central store. The ADML files in this folder also are in a language-specific folder, such as en-US.