Force Applications to be re-installed by Group Policy

Group Policy Manager allows to re-deploy applications globally, but doesn’t provide ability to do it for individual machines. This may be required if an application got corrupted, or somebody removed it using Add/Remove Programs on a client PC. That’s right, removing program locally via Control Panel will not force re-installation via group policy.

Deleting a single registry key an a client PC will force Group Policy to re-deploy an application only for that single machine.

  • Open Registry Editor regedit.exe
  • Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Group Policy\AppMgmt
    You will see number of long IDs, each representing a centrally deployed application
  • Delete a key representing the application in question
    To find out which key to delete check values inside the keys where you will find Product Name and other details
  • Run gpupdate /force

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *