Group Policy Basics Part 1 7 Use of Resultant Set of Policy and GPRESULT

Resultant Set of Policy
Resultant Set of Policy is the phrase that is used to indicate which policies apply to client machines and users. When the settings of all your GPOs have been sorted out and the system knows which policies need to be applied based on the rules you've put in place, the Resultant Set of Policies is that list of settings. In this section, we're going to spend a bit of time talking about two tools that will help show you what policies will apply to a particular client. One of them even allows you to model which settings will apply before you put them into production, so it serves as a great planning and troubleshooting tool.
GPRESULT
I'll start with GPRESULT because it's been around longer and is the command-line tool you'll use to see which policies are applying to your clients. GPRESULT was originally included as part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit, but is present by default in both Windows 2003 and 2008. You can read about the various things you can do with this tool by opening a command prompt and typing
gpresult /?
While GPRESULT can be used for a number of things, our purpose here is to use it to generate Resultant Set of Policy data. Specifically, we're going to look at the following combinations of commands:
gpresult /R
By using the /R switch with nothing else, summary data for the various policies and settings will be printed to your command prompt.
gpresult /V
This is the same as the /R command, only the results will be verbose.
If you don't want all of the settings, you can set the /SCOPE option and choose either USER or COMPUTER, which will result in only the User or Computer node settings being returned.