Group Policy preference hurdle.

I’ve been wanting to use the group policy preferences at a couple of sites but been unable to due to the fact that you need to have a Vista or Windows 2008 server in the domain. I knew that one or the other was required, but I was kind of hoping that you could get away with using a Vista machine not on the domain to edit the group policy settings. Much like you can use “connect to” in eventvwr and other mmc consoles I was hoping this feature would be available so I could take my consultants laptop and edit various group policy preferences at some of my sites without needing a domain joined pc. Alas, this is not to be – in fact gpmc is not even available unless you are joined to the domain.
Here’s hoping that some enterprising company will come up with an application that will enable you to deploy group policy preferences without Vista or Windows 2008.