Group Policy testing

How do I go about testing a Group Policy before applying it to an entire OU?

I currently have an OU with many users within the OU. I want to test the Group Policy on one of these users before applying it to everyone in the OU. The Group Policy is very simple, i.e. changing the proxy settings in Internet Explorer.

As I have never used Group Policies before (I've just read a tutorial about it from Microsoft's website).

I have created the Group Policy (just changed to proxy to something which doesn't exist), but don't know how to apply it to a single user.

Answer

Its always a good idea to create a test OU in your AD tree to apply and test new policies. That way you can apply the policy just to that OU and make sure everything works. I keep a couple of virtual machines in that OU. This makes it easy to recover if the GP breaks something on the machine. I take a snapshot before applying the GP and restore the snapshot if necessary.

I also create some test users as well for that OU. One user with admin/domain admin privileges and one without. That way I can see how the GP affects each type of user.