Controlling Libraries with Group Policy

[dhoward_westexetc]

Well, yes and no, my issue was that libraries took 10 seconds to do anything from the shortcuts on the explorer bar, the start menu icons work fine, so this removed the ones from the explorer bar

Right, I have the slowness on the Start Menu shortcuts as well as those on the explorer bar. It does that even with the Public folder removed.

[dhoward_westexetc]

Hey all, thanks for your help. Managed to fix my Libraries issue by....denying Students access to the Public folder location. Now the libraries comes up in an instant!!

[Seker]

Thanks for the information on locking down libraries. For our faculty & staff, we don't currently plan on restricting their ability to customize, but we did want to be able to do some customizing ourselves.

As AngryTechnician indicated, Microsoft's official way is to customize and replace the .library-ms XML files, but that overwrites any customizations already made to a library. What we ended up doing is using a run-once login script to run some commands using a command-line utility I was able to find (I found a couple of them, actually) that removed the Public folders from the default libraries and also added some folders that we create on our employee's local disks for their personal music, pictures, etc. to the default libraries (we tend to dissuade them from putting non-school related, personal media on the network).

The downside was that the two utilities were just source code samples from Microsoft so I had to make them and then figure them out myself since there was virtually no documentation:

• Shell Library Command Line Source: Shell Library Command Line Sample (Windows)
• Shell Libraries Utility Source (select native APIs version): Shell Libraries | Windows 7 Online Training | Learn | Channel 9
• I also compiled them with some explanation here for convenience (links at end of article)

Hope this is useful. I'm glad I found these forums, though, as it looks like a lot of valuable information gets tossed around.

[gshaw]

2 years on from this thread, what are people doing with Libraries now?

a) disable completely (does this affect anything else?)
b) customise the library file to remove the Public locations
c) something else?

[DrCheese]

I customise the library file to remove the public locations.

Other than that, it's never been a problem at all. I have no idea why people are butchering Windows & removing them totally, putting them in an unsupported scenario.

[gshaw]

I customise the library file to remove the public locations.

Other than that, it's never been a problem at all. I have no idea why people are butchering Windows & removing them totally, putting them in an unsupported scenario.

Agree, once the Public locations are out the way I'll tolerate the rest in order to stay supported, likewise with roaming profiles \ Sysprep...

Edit: just did it from the Windows GUI and copied the resulting files across into the mandatory profile