How to check if you are editing GPO’s using a local, or central store

After my previous posts about preparing to build a new Group Policy for Windows 7 and about setting up the Central Store it occurred to me that it may be useful to actually check that when we edit the GPO that we are actually using the admx files from our Central Store rather than those stored locally. This may not seem important until you think that Windows Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 all ship with different versions of the ADMX files so you want to avoid a situation where you are building your GPO and dont realise that you are missing potentially useful options.

Thankfully it is very simple to see if you are using the ADMX files from your Central Store or not:

This shows the ADMX files are being loaded locally

This shows the ADMX files being loaded from the Central Store