Our domain-joined laptops receive their wireless profile settings via group policy.

We are going to be updating our network's wireless configuration to support more modern and secure settings.

If we change the wireless profile settings in Group Policy before the network is updated, this will knock the users offline until the wifi network is changed and if we change the network before the wireless profile is updated, the laptops will not be able to get online to receive the updated wireless profile.

How can we configure group policy to reconfigure the laptops to match the upcoming changes without having the old and new wireless networks running at the same time or having to have every user connect to a wired connection to receive the updated group policy when the configuration changes?

hii,

You can configure or change wireless profile setting via group policy in active directory domain service (ADDS) environment, Here i found relevant Technet links for you:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg266419.aspx

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/c262fdc3-9e04-4645-8896-9b27aa247273/wireless-profiles-via-gpo-are-there-finer-settings

Follow the steps guided in these link.

Regards.

How can we configure group policy to reconfigure the laptops to match the upcoming changes without having the old and new wireless networks running at the same time or having to have every user connect to a wired connection to receive the updated group policy when the configuration changes?

Hi,

As Paul suggested the way to configure GPO, you can go ahead.  After configuring the new policy enable the enforcement on it, so that the new policy configuration will get pushed forcefully.

You must be aware of, there could be some machines where policy may not get pushed, to achieve them, run the command gpupdate /force in client side.

We already have wireless settings configured by GPO.

The question I have is how can we change the existing settings with the least disruption for laptop users who only use wireless?  Editing the policy will make the users unable to reconnect after they receive the policy update since they do not have a wired connection available. 

This is a problem because it is not possible to change both the network settings and change the GPO at the exact same moment.

> This is a problem because it is not possible to change both the network > settings and change the GPO at the exact same moment.   Excactly. This sounds like a hen-egg-problem...  

If the updated network settings are going to be created with a new SSID, is it possible to create multiple wireless profiles in a single GPO so that the existing profile is still there to use now and the future profile settings are also there configured in the workstation?  That way when the wireless network is changed, the laptops will be able to automatically connect to the new wireless connection and then we can go back and modify the GPO to remove the old wireless profile.