These WMI enhancements are what is used by the RSOP engine to store resultant set of policy data in the WMI repository on each system, each time policy is processed.
In both cases, this RSOP capability relies on some WMI enhancements that Microsoft made to XP, Server 2003 and later versions of the OS. The RSOP infrastructure also provides a mechanism for doing what’s called, RSOP Planning or Modeling, which lets you ask 'what-if' questions about changes that you might want to make to your AD infrastructure that could affect Group Policy application on a given target computer or user. This mode of forensically checking GP processing is called RSOP Logging or RSOP Results.
RSOP was first introduced in Windows XP as a way of letting administrators find out what happened during the last GP processing cycle on a given Windows system.
A question that appeared on the newsgroups today prompted me to blog about Group Policy Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) and its capabilities.
