The Performance team handles Group Policies for several different components - most notably Printing, Internet Explorer and Terminal Server. In most environments, the Active Directory administrator handles the design, implementation and maintenance all of the group policies - even if another group is responsible for the technologies affected by the policies. When an issue arises with one of these technologies, often it is the administrator for that system who is trying to troubleshoot the problem - who may not know much about the policies in place. So today we're going to go over some basic Group Policy concepts.

The primary purpose of Group Policy is to apply policy settings to computers and users in an Active Directory domain to enable IT administrators to automate one-to-many management of users and computers. This simplifies administrative tasks and reduces IT costs. Administrators can efficiently implement security settings, enforce IT policies, and distribute software consistently across a given site, domain, or range of organizational units.(continue at source)