As most IT administrators know, group policy is the feature in Windows that allows you to configured large number of windows computer easily and automatically. These configuration settings are stored in Active Directory (AD) for the workstation to then poll on a periodic basis for any configuration changes. This polling typically take 90 minutes (with some random offset), meaning that any configuration changes that an IT admin makes takes up to 2 hours or more to take effect.

One of the great new features that Microsoft has added to Windows 8 is now the ability to force a group policy update to run. This new feature called “Group Policy Update” can effectively give admins the way to push out configuration changes to all the computers online in less than 10 minutes. This is of course very handy if you want to quickly push out a quick policy change or quickly undo a setting that you might have configured by mistake.