Updated! 

Microsoft and Full Armour released a product called ADMX Migrator.

The tool enables you to migrate the windows adm templates to the new Vista/Longhorn format admx. To be able to install the ADMX Migrator you need the Microsoft Management Console 3.0, you can find the upgrade software at www.microsoft.com/downloads to upgrade your current MMC2.0 snapin if you didn't upgrade it already.

Well when you start the installation you get a pretty need screen see figure 1

Figure 1

You get several screens with acceptance policy, who may use the program etc.

After you started up the migration tool you get to see figure 3

This is the default starup screen and now you can start to convert adm templates to admx templates. If you right click on the ADMX Editor you get the option to migrate adm templates. See figure 4

Figure 3

Figure 4 

We have selected the Remote Desktop policy created for datacrash to migrate it to admx format.

You see in figure 5 the settings that you can configure, edit , change etc. When you however go to File > you do not have the option to save the template. You have to rightclick on the Remote Desktop and then you get the option Save, Save As etc. see figure 6 

Figure 5

After you saved your work you are able to edit the admx template with for example notepad++ to see what actually has been changed in the new style. 

Figure 6

You can see the new setup below here.

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As you can see the setup has been totally changed and looks more like XML then the old adm templates :) This means we all have to get back to school to manually create policy's for the environment that runs on Vista or Longhorn.

You can download the ADMX Migrator here

We are very curious if Sysprosoft who has the ADM Template Editor will comeup with a migration tool. The ADM Template Editor is doing an excelent job in creating or editing hands-on adm templates and I used it a lot to create policies for the environment I maintain.

I talked with Alan Cuthbertson from www.sysprosoft.com about the admx files. Here is what he has to say about it.

" I am working on it, but it gets rather complex if you try to support all of the possibilities. Hopefully I will have it out in the new year.I did try the free conversion program from Full Armour and found it fairly cumbersome.Do be honest I am not sure that ADMX files are such a great thin. They are useful if you are supporting multiple languages or need a specific templates in lots of Policies, but for a template that is to be used in only a couple of Policies, I think I would stick with ADM files."

And how they see the future there with adm files vs admx and adml

"What I am confident we can do is provide an editor that can load ADM files and save them in ADMX format. We can also read ADMX files that we have created and edit them. What may be a bit harder is to read any ADMX file edit it and save it again. It seems to be really complex the way Microsoft cross references its stuff.One thing that I haven’t tested is how multi language support is provided. I presume we can just copy the ADML file to each language subdirectory. We may allow the user to edit the strings in each language but that seems overkill. I must admit I am disappointed that the ADMX files do not provide any new function. For instance it would be nice to edit Binary fields."

well we at Datacrash are curious to how this will develop and are also disapointed that you can't edit binary fields. We keep you all updated about this.