In ESET Security Management Center (ESMC) 7.x, policies are defined by the product. More specific policies generally overwrite less specific policies; however, you now have the ability to force a given policy setting so that it cannot be overwritten by a child policy in its own hierarchy. Groups to which a policy is applied are displayed next to it in ESMC, you can view information about which policies are being applied and the resulting configuration on each client computer.
For more information on creating policies and assigning them to workstations, see Create a new policy and assign it to a group.
If the Apply or Force flag is not set, a policy setting will be applied according to the group hierarchy described in the section above. Use the Apply or Force features to define how active configuration parameters are adopted by child policies:
Force flag have priority and cannot be overwritten by a policy set with a higher hierarchy (even if that policy has a Force flag). This assures that this setting will not be changed by additional policies when merging.
Apply flag will be sent to the client. However, when merging policies, this policy setting can be ovewritten by a different policy. When a policy is applied to a client computer, and a particular setting has the Apply flag, that setting is changed regardless of the client's local configuration. Because this setting is not forced it can be changed by other policies later on.
When creating policies, you can configure additional rules. These rules allow you to arrange the same settings in various policies:
ESMC 7.x and the recent ESET security products support merging of local and remote lists in policies in a new way.
Examples: