1.3 Overview

Group Policy: Scripts Extension Encoding provides a mechanism for an administrator to instruct an arbitrarily large group of clients to execute administrator-specified code at computer start, computer shut-down, user log-on, and user log-off. The code executed by clients is in the form of a command-line tool or batch-processing script that is present either on the client's local file system or at a network file system location.

This mechanism allows administrators to perform various maintenance and management tasks on client computers, including (but not limited to) collecting diagnostic information, invoking security scans, cleaning or resetting system state, and installing tools.

The protocol allows for administration of up to two separate groups of scripts. These two groups correspond to logon/logoff scripts and startup/shutdown scripts. The grouping provides an organization of scripts that will execute during different system events.

User-logon scripts configured using this protocol differ from user-logon scripts configured as part of user-object scripts [MSFT-PROFSCR].

An overview of the timeline when user and computer policies are applied to a client is described in [MS-GPOD] section 3.1.