Let’s take a look at how to import the Microsoft Best Practice Policies into your Policy Based Management Server.  You can also import policies that you have exported from other servers.  The Microsoft Best Practice Policies are a great place to start learning what you can do with PBM, by simply importing them and inspecting their various configurations.  They are installed by default and simply need to be imported from the following directory.

%installdir%\100\tools\policies\

 Under that directory there are several others separated by technology like SSIS and SSAS.  We will focus on the policies in the “%installdir%\100\tools\policies\Databaseengine\1033” folder.  Let’s import the Microsoft Best Practice Policy named “Database Auto Shrink”.  Right click on the policies folder under Policy Management on your PBM server and select import.  In the Import dialog, click the ellipsis next to “File to Import” and navigate to the policies folder mentioned above.  We want to select the “Database Auto Shrink.xml” file.  Here are the options we want to choose for our import:

That’s it!  Please make a note that we imported the policy in a disabled state and I always suggest you do that.  Once the policy has been imported you can inspect all the settings to make sure they are appropriate for your environment.