Active Directory Question:

Answer #1
Group policy template and group policy container.

Answer #2
The Group Policy Container (GPC) is the portion of a GPO stored in Active Directory that resides on each domain controller in the domain. The GPC is responsible for keeping references to Client Side Extensions (CSEs), the path to the GPT, paths to software installation packages, and other referential aspects of the GPO.
For the GPC, we are concerned with the System container. By expanding this container, you will find a sub container named Policies. Expanding the Policies container will expose a list of GUIDs, which correspond to all of the GPOs that exist within the domain. Each GUID container can be expanded again to show two more containers: Machine and User.
In almost all cases, these containers are empty. The reason is that the GPC is not responsible for storing the policy settings. That job is left for the Group Policy Template (GPT), which is located in the SYSVOL folder structure of the domain controllers. However, you will see information stored under these containers when you configure Software Installation policies. The package GUID and registration is stored in the GPC after a software package is configured. However, it is still not very informative because the key information is hidden from view and must be accessed using a tool that can see the Active Directory object attributes.