How to: Push default font in Outlook 2010 using Group Policy Preferences

When you want to force all your users to use a default font within Outlook 2010, you can configure this by using Group Policy Preferences. In this example I’ve made my own custom font settings within Outlook 2010. So let’s open the registry to see what keys are added or changed in my user environment.

1.) Open a command prompt and type regedit.exe. When you don’t have rights to start this tool, you can also open the registry remotely from another server.
2.) Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\MailSettings. There are added some binary keys.
3.) Create a new group policy, for example Outlook2010 Default Fonts
4.) Navigate to the User Configuration \ Preferences \ Windows Settings \ Registry
5.) Add a new Registry Item
6.) Add the keys in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\MailSettings
7.) When you link the new policy to the right organization unit and login with a user, let’s see whats happening…
8.) As you can see, the new default font is Verdana, 10.

Hopefully this is a userfull blogpost to push you in the right direction! This is one of the examples how powerfull the new User Preferences whitin Server 2008 R2 are.