Controlling and managing Google Update behavior via Group Policy and/or the Registry

Google Update for Enterprise

“Table of contents

• Introduction
• Technical overview
• Obtaining the Administrative Template
• Configuring the Group Policies
• Policies
• Registry settings
• Examples

Introduction

This document contains information about applying policies to Google Update/Google Installer within the enterprise. Google Update is an end-user application that installs and updates many of Google's applications for Microsoft Windows®.

The document is written for Microsoft Windows® domain administrators as well as power users who want to control updates on their individual computers. By defining enterprise-wide policies for Google Update, you can specify which Google applications users may install and how they are updated. For example, you can choose to only allow users to install specific applications, have Google Update check for updates once a week, or disable updates of an application until after you've tested them in your environment. You can configure update policies before installing applications that use Google Update or at any subsequent time.

Technical overview

Google Update for Enterprise makes use of Microsoft Windows® Group Policy and Active Directory, a services infrastructure that delivers and applies configurations to users and computers. If you are unfamiliar with Group Policy technology, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa374177.aspx. Power users can use the same policies to control updates on their own machines.

Google provides an Administrative Template that defines policies for Google Update/Google Installer. You can apply Google Update policies by loading the Administrative Template into the Group Policy Editor of your choice.

Network administrators can apply a set of policies to their managed computers using Active Directory. Alternatively, they can use other administration mechanisms, such as logon scripts, to directly modify the registry values described in the Registry settings section below.

Power users who want to use Google Update policies on an individual computer can do so by loading the Administrative Template into Group Policy Editor.

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An “official” means to help manage and control the Google Update process and behavior. From disabling it to turning off automatic updates to application specific behavior. It’s nice to see this level of manageability for a process I see running on so many machines. The admin in me really likes this…

(via LifeHacker - Use Group Policy Editor to Customize or Disable Google Update)