Desktop shortcuts instead of mapped drives via script

Question

I was thrown into the AD support arena just over a year ago and with the help of outside support I have the mess I inherited under control. Now I need to move forward using AD for our company current and future needs.

Currently each department has a VBS scripted assigned to it. Based on what the user is a member of they get the department drive(s) and the assigned letter. When the user is created the reference to the VBS is added to the user account in AD. Basically it's a if this then that, else move on to the next map drive in the list.

I have a group of users running that I'm running out of letters with and would like to just map shortcuts to their desktops doing away with the drive mappings in Windows Explorer all together. Eventually I want to do this for all employees so they don't have a constant open connection to a network share (for security reasons).

Any guidance or links to a how-to would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use a group policy for the user/group that is set to add the shortcut(s). A target would be e.g. \\foo-server\bar-path.

If it is set to refresh them every login, the shortcuts will be moved to the default position every login (upper left corner), which might annoy some users. I think "run once" in the policy or if available some sort of "create if not found" option would mitigate this.