How Policies are Applied in the SoftGrid Environment

A common question we get is "How do policies work with regards to a virtual application?"  Well, the answer is that it depends on the policy.  Policies applied via a Group Policy Object (GPO) are not applied to the Virtual Environment; meaning, policies set through Windows Settings in the Group Policy Editor are not applied to the Virtual Environment.

Policies applied via an Administrative Template-based policy settings .ADM and .POL file are applied to the Virtual Environment; meaning, policies set through Administrative Templates in the Group Policy Editor are applied to the Virtual Environment.

During every application launch, we process the local policy files on the system:

Machine Policy -
%systemroot%\system32\grouppolicy\machine\registry.pol

Shared Policy -
%allusersprofile%\ntuser.pol

User Policy -
%userprofile%\ntuser.pol

Currently there is no way to disable/prevent GPO’s from being process during application launch.

When applying policies, SoftGrid does not distinguish between HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER. If a policy is configured for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, it will be applied to HKEY_CURRENT_USER. When a SoftGrid application is launched, HKCU\software\polices\ is populated with additional policy keys from the workstation policy cache.

- J.C. Hornbeck