GPO Desktop Icons 1

[JeffITman]

Is there an easy way using GPO to set which Icons appear on the Desktop and Start Menu rather than changing the default user profile on 150 machines?

A previous company of mine had their policies set up that way so when a particular user in an OU logged in, certain icons would appear.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've tried looking through a couple books that I have but nothing really goes in depth in regards to desktop icons.

 

[Dublin73]

Hi, there is a way to do this which works nicely... If you're running Windows Server 2003. Using a GPO you redirect everyone's Desktop and Start Menu to two specified folders on the network, one folder for the Start Menu and one for the desktop. To clarify, not one Start Menu and desktop folder for each user, but just these two folders for all of your users.

Now drop all of the potential user Start Menu and desktop shortcuts into these two folders, all of them, note* each user will not have access to all of these shortcuts. That's where the next bit comes in...

Download and install the Microsoft Windows Acces Based Enumeration snap in...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...D9-78D9-4342-A485-B030AC442084&displaylang=en

From there, you need to create Windows global groups, possibly called Sage, Mozilla, MS Excel etc. and you permission each shortcut individually.

The end user only sees what they have permission to see. So you have control over what icons you want them to have on their desktop and Start Menu, based on what global groups you drop the user into.

good luck with it