Microsoft have just they will allow small business with less that 10 seats to use for free. But even having to configured 10 copies of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) can be a pain so below is a quick tutorial on how you can Group Policy Enable Microsoft Security Essentials.
Update: Microsoft have now updated their web site to say small business can now “officially” use MSE.
Before we begin I want to be clear that MSE does NOT natively support group policy this is simply a way to configure the registry keys of the application using the key setting.
Note: If the below instructions to create the registry keys seems like to much work you will be glad to know that I have put a link at the bottom to an XML Group Policy Preferences Registry file. You can use this file to import the all the Policy Registry setting I talk about below automatically.
Before we begin we first need to know how to create a Group Policy Preferences Registry Key setting that we will use to control each of the registry keys we need to configured MSE. The following steps will need to be repeated for each registry key below.
Step 1. Edit a Group Policy Object that is applied to the computers you want this setting applied.
Step 2. Navigate to Computer Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings > Registry
Step 3. In the Menu click on Action > New > Registry Item
Now you know how to configure a registry key setting using Group Policy Preferences you can create a new Registry Item for each registry key listed below.
Note: The Data values below that are highlighted in BOLD are the values you need to use to replication the examples shown.
Now you need to create a registry few specific registry keys. In this example we are going to configured a Full Scheduled scan to run each day at 8am. We are also going to enable the option to check for an update before scanning and we are going to configure the scan to