Internet Explorer 10 ADM

Question

I am currently having an issue trying to attach the IE 10 GPO template to any group policy. Here is a little bit of a background as I played around with this in our test environment. The GPO will state that the policy is loaded up without any issue, but
when you go and drill down to find the settings, the old settings from IE 9 are still there and the ADM is not loaded up. The only way I can force the ADM to be loaded up is to rename the inetres.admx to inetres.admxold (or something that group policy will
not load up), and then I can load up the IE 10 group polices, which btw is an ADM and not an ADMX without any issue. At this point I wonder why I should not just load up the IE 11 ADM to save us the headache of upgrading the GPO when we do move up to 11. A
few questions.
1) Is the IE 10/11 inetres.adm backwards compatible with older versions of IE? I do see settings specific to older version of IE but I wanted to get a feeling from anyone who had deployed it previously.
2) How come a specific GPO will not load up the ADM when an older ADM is sitting in the policy definitions folder?
We are running WS 2008 R2. I have read about some compatibility issues with WS 2008 R2 and IE 10, but our test environment is running a WS 2008 R2 environment too and I was able to implement the ADM fine once renaming the ADMX. I wanted to avoid doing that
as we do have older policies that rely on this template (for now).

Answer 1

Hi,
Before going further, since Microsoft Windows Vista® and Windows Server 2008, a new format was introduced for displaying registry-based policy settings. Registry-based policy
settings (located under the Administrative Templates category in the Group Policy Object Editor) are defined using a standards-based, XML file format known as ADMX files. These new files replace ADM files, which used their own markup language.
Regarding this point, the following article can be referred to for more information.
Managing Group Policy ADMX Files Step-by-Step Guide
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709647(v=WS.10).aspx
Besides, ADMX templates are backward compatible. If we want to use the same set of ADMX templates for our domain, we can create a central store for administrative template
files, for if a central store exists, GPMC will retrieve template files from the central store.
Regarding how to create a central store, the following article can be referred to for more information.
How to create the Central Store for Group Policy Administrative Template files in Windows Vista
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929841
In addition, regarding compatibility of admx files, the following thread can be referred to for more information.
Updated ADMx/ADML files to Server 2012 / Windows 8
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/20bb6a53-53a3-474f-8794-4719c6eebfb9/updated-admxadml-files-to-server-2012-windows-8?forum=winserverGP
Best regards,
Frank Shen