Windows Active Directory provides policies in order to manage different configurations in a Windows Active Directory. The Group Policy is used to set configurations for a group of computers. By default when a group policy is created or updated the new policy is distributed between 30-90 minutes. But sometimes this policy can not be distributed for some of the computers. In order to get new updates about group policy, the update should be forced by using the gpupdate /force command.
Force Policy Update
Policy updates can be forced with the gpupdate /force command. This command clears all existing policies and gets the updated policies from the policy server. This command can be executed in both MS-DOS and PowerShell.
> gpupdate /forceAfter the policy update, the computer should be rebooted in order to apply new policies.
Force User Policy Update
If the current environment is very large and contains a lot of policies the updated policy can take a lot of time. So we can force the group policy uıpdate for specific objects like computers or users. The user policy update can be forced with the /target:user option where the scope will be user policies.
> gpupdate /target:user /forceForce Computer Policy Update
We can also specifically force computer policy update. This means the user policy will not be updated.
> gpupdate /target:user /forceForce Policy Update with PowerShell Invoke-GPUpdate
PowerShell also provides the Invoke-GPUpdate command in order to update policies. Following command can be used to force policy updates in Windows operating systems.
PS> Invoke-GPUpdate -RandomDelayInMinutes 0 -Force