Friday, December 08, 2006

ADM to ADMX Conversion

In previous posts I have gone through the process of converting admx templates that ship with Vista to the old style adm templates. Thankfully the process of converting your custom adm templates to admx templates is a lot easier thanks to a tool by FullArmour that has been licensed by Microsoft, ADMX Migrator. It is available for download at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=77409 and requires MMCC 3.0 and .NET 2.0 to be installed prior to installation.

It comes in two flavours, UI and command line, first we will use the UI to convert a standard adm template to an ADMX template. Launch the ADMX editor and you get the following:-
















If you click on the ‘Generate ADMX from ADM…’ option in the right hand pane then navigate to the adm you want to convert, admx migrator then creates a temporary admx template then you click ‘yes’ to load this temporary admx template into console. When it has loaded into the console you can navigate the admx template in much the same way as in the GPMC in Vista:-



From here you will notice that in the right hand pane you can create new categories or policy settings:-


Once you have created the new setting you can control how the setting is displayed in GPMC and any elements such as listboxes, combo boxes, drop down lists as shown here:-



After you have amended the admx template you can save the completed template, so the tool makes it easy to convert old adm templates, create new admx templates, and amend them as you require, certainly easier than typing the admx by hand and looks tidier in the new gpmc than importing the legacy adm templates.