IE 10 GPO Template

Question

Hello all,
As I understand it, the Internet Explorer Maintenance Package with IE 10 is being discontinued. The issue I am running into is I downloaded the ADM in order to load the latest IE group policy template but I still have the IE 8 ADM loaded up as IE 8
is still in production in this environment with settings that are still in use under the maintenance window so I cannot just go ahead and replace that older template at the current time. I just want to test drive the new one. Is this possible to have both
of these ADMs loaded up without any conflicts? Or should I just load up the IE 10 ADM once we have migrated everything over to IE 10? How is it possible to just test the IE 10 template without disrupting current operations?

Answer 1

you can't have both templates available on a single machine at the same time, since they are named inetres.adm (or inetres.admx)
what you could do, is to setup a workstation, install RSAT on it, and have a differing version of the templates on there.
then you login to that workstation with your domain GP editing account, and play around with some test GPOs.
Note that the inetres is automatically updated by the installation of IE, so if the workstation gets IE10 on it (or IE11), that is the version of inetres you will be using there.
In case you have implemented a group policy central store in your domain, this won't work (because the point of a central store is that templates are always retrieved from the central store i.e. your DC's), but, you can override that central store behaviour
on a machine (so that it ignores the central store and instead reads templates from the machine local store)
Don
(Please take a moment to "Vote as Helpful" and/or "Mark as Answer", where applicable.
This helps the community, keeps the forums tidy, and recognises useful contributions. Thanks!)