Adding the Administrative Templates (.admx) for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 to your Windows 2008 R2 GPMC

I had to add some Windows 8 specific GPO’s this week and found the instructions available on the Microsoft website are poor. So I will try to explain the procedure better.

Let’s start with downloading the admin template files from here

The downloaded file will extract itself to a folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Group Policy\Windows Server 2012\PolicyDefinitions). Inside that folder you will find all admx files and the corresponding language files (in their own folders).

Now go to the folder C:\windows\syvol\domain\policies on your DC and create a folder policydefinitions  and copy all the admx files from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Group Policy\Windows Server 2012\PolicyDefinitions and any language file folders you may need. The complete destination folder path will be C:\windows\syvol\domain\policies\policydefinitions 

In my case I added all the admx files and only the corresponding English languages (en-us).

You will need to close your group policy console if open and re-open it. As shown below Administrative templates will be loaded from the central store.