[mops]

Hello.

I have been asked to deploy a <filename>.url shortcut to everybody in the office.

In Windows XP i would just copy a shortcut to %allusersprofile%\favorites on each PC (we have Altiris here to do those sort of jobs, but any way really would do).

But in Windows 7 ?

I searched for 2 hours and I cannot find any reference to "All Users\Favorites" on Windows 7 ?

All users start menu is in a new place - "c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\" but there are no favorites folder there ?

What would be a good way to do that ?

Thanks in advance,
Mops.

[cluberti]

The location has been moved to C:\Users\Public\Favorites (you'll find the favorites folder to only be a junction point to this location now), however favorites in this folder will not show up in the UI of any existing user profile. The easiest way to add a favorite is to copy the URL from a central location to the user's profile, either in group policy or via a logon script (%userprofile%\Favorites).

[mops]

cluberti, on 11 March 2010 - 03:56 PM, said:

The location has been moved to C:\Users\Public\Favorites (you'll find the favorites folder to only be a junction point to this location now), however favorites in this folder will not show up in the UI of any existing user profile.

This is what I found.

Quote

The easiest way to add a favorite is to copy the URL from a central location to the user's profile, either in group policy or via a logon script (%userprofile%\Favorites).

Yes, that way did cross my mind, but this seems to be pretty complicated. Even more so that over here GP or login script changes have to go through change control process so they have to be approved by 50 ppl and it takes 3 weeks (I am overexadurating a bit). I cant believe there no easier way to do this, especially if it is pretty straigth forward in Windows XP...

[cluberti]

Favorites, desktop shortcuts/icons, etc are considered "user" items. Hence, they're stored and read from the user's profile only, by default. It might be a pain, but you're going to have to endure it . If this is something that's going to be ongoing, you could put things into a default user profile, but that won't help you for users who already have an existing profile on that machine, for instance.

[mops]

Yah, i guess that's the 'new way'.

I'll do it via group policy. There are some favourites delivered here that way. Just a matter of adding another one.

Thanks for help anyways.

Now, I also need to add a new start menu shortcut... to all users of all computers... oh joy...

Mops.

[cluberti]

Give the deployment guys blog post on this a read.

[mops]

Adding a shortcut to start menu seems to be doable from group policy also.

It appears to work ok, however I have 1 last issue.

I'm trying to make .url shortcut, but I want to use an icon from a <filename>.exe. The c:\program files\<folder>\<filename>.exe is present on all client computers, but not on the server I'm setting up the GPO from. So the 'shortcut properties' dialog does not allow me to specify this "c:\program files\<folder>\<filename>.exe", because the location does not exsist (on the server). IS there a way to go around this issue ?

I tried crating shortcut and using an import function, but still the icon setting doesnt work...