AD FSMO and remote DC GPO creation

Question

Just a question about AD FSMO and GPO. We have two DC's with FSMO roles in the main office. For the remote offices we have DC's with GC on them. If I have WAN problem, will I be able to create a GPO just for that remote office users ? Will the GPO work for
those remote users if I link the GPO to their OU ? Or each time I create a GPO do I need to have a connection to the DC's with FSMO roles ? Windows 2008R2

Answer 1

If you edit the Group Policy in your domain changes will be stored in AD and sysvol and that will be replicated out to other DCs in your domain.
Editing or creation of Group Policy Objects (GPO) is always done from the GPO copy found in the PDC Emulator's SYSVOL share, unless configured not to do so by the administrator 
So PDC Emultaor plays an important role.  You can display the current server GPMC is working against through View - Options - General, check the middle check box
Computers/Users in the physical site they are in will use the subnets you have configured in Sites and Services for DcLocator and will authenticate against the local domain controller local to them.  Assuming the domain controller has a copy of the
GPO and replication has occurred then they shouldn't have a problem applying the GPO.
The article below is for 2003 but it still is a good read. I've pasted some of it below and linked to the article as well.
Group Policy Replication
In a domain that contains more than one domain controller, Group Policy information takes time to propagate, or replicate, from one domain controller to another. Low bandwidth network connections between domain controllers slow replication. The Group Policy
infrastructure has mechanisms to manage these issues.
Each GPO is stored partly in the Sysvol on the domain controller and partly in Active Directory. GPMC and Group Policy Object Editor present and manage the GPO as a single unit. For example, when you set permissions on a GPO in GPMC, GPMC is actually setting
permissions on objects in both Active Directory and the Sysvol. It is not recommended that you manipulate these separate objects independently outside of GPMC and the Group Policy Object Editor. As shown in the following figure, it is important to understand
that these two separate components of a GPO rely on different replication mechanisms. The file system portion is replicated through FRS, independently of the replication handled by Active Directory. Only the Sysvol subfolder (%systemroot%\SYSVOL\sysvol) is
shared and replicated. Sysvol was designed to allow multiple domain’s Sysvols to be replicated in the same tree — each domain’s Sysvol is contained under a subfolder of the Sysvol share. For the current domain, a copy of the domain’s Sysvol subtree is also
stored directly under the %systemroot%\SYSVOL\domain folder.
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