Administrative Templates are a feature of

Group Policy Group Policy is a feature of the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (including Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 11) that controls the working environment of user accounts and computer accounts. Group Policy provides centralized mana ...

, a

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technology for centralized management of machines and users in an

Active Directory Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. Windows Server operating systems include it as a set of processes and services. Originally, only centralized domain management used Active Direct ...

environment. Administrative Templates facilitate the management of registry-based policy. An ADM file is used to describe both the user interface presented to the Group Policy administrator and the registry keys that should be updated on the target machines. An ADM file is a text file with a specific syntax which describes both the interface and the registry values which will be changed if the policy is enabled or disabled. ADM files are consumed by the Group Policy Object Editor (GPEdit).

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

Service Pack 2 shipped with five ADM files (system.adm, inetres.adm, wmplayer.adm, conf.adm and wuau.adm). These are merged into a unified "namespace" in GPEdit and presented to the administrator under the Administrative Templates node (for both machine and user policy).

Syntax

A simple ADM example follows: CLASS MACHINE CATEGORY "Wikipedia Apps" POLICY "Wikipedia" KEYNAME "Software\WikiSoft\Preferences" EXPLAIN "Configures WikiSoft Preferences" VALUENAME "SharingEnabled" VALUEON "Yes" VALUEOFF "No" END POLICY END CATEGORY A valid ADM file must have the following keywords: * Class - either MACHINE or USER * Category - Defines organizational structure of ADM and where it will be displayed in the GPEdit window. * Policy - Groups definitions into one node and configuration screen of the GPEdit tree Optional keywords used include: * Keyname - used to define what registry key will be affected View Filtering must be turned off in order to see custom preference settings (such as this example) in the Group Policy Editor.

ADM files across different platforms

It is important to note that ADM files shipped with Microsoft operating systems include descriptions of policy settings for not just that platform but for all other platforms on which Group Policy is supported. For example, the Windows XP Service Pack 2 ADM files described policy settings not just for this platform but also for

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and

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. This approach allows management of machines that are running an operating system other than that on which GPEdit is used.

Managing ADM files

By default, ADM files are stored in each GPO, within Sysvol on domain controllers. This creates a simple and effective model for replicating ADM files across domain controllers (which is handled by the File Replication Service). However, in some instances this can cause operational issues. To this end, various policy settings are available to manage the manner in which ADM files are read and stored. These are described in Microsoft's KB article 816662.

ADMX files

Starting with

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

, ADM files have mostly been replaced with ADMX files (and their associated language-specific ADML files). The ADMX file is structured in standard

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

format, whereas the ADM files used a proprietary format.

References

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External links

Important information about Windows XP Service Pack 2 ADM Files (KB 842933)

Recommendations for managing Group Policy Administrative Templates (.ADM) Files (KB 816662)
Microsoft server technology Active Directory Windows administration