Custom Start Menus on a per room basis.

Hi there,

I am looking to have custom start menus for different labs, is anyone able to point me in the right direction, I am using server 2003 and XP SP3.

To Clarify:

If user a logs into room 3 he gets the specific start menu for rooms 3, if he then logs off and goes to rooms 2 he then gets room 2's specific start menus.

Organise your PCs in Active Directory by rooms.

Apply a GPO to each of the OUs you have for each room.

In each GPO specify a redirected folder for the Start Menu.

Create each Start Menu in an accessible network location.

Done all that but the menus do not show. :)

Is something interfering with the way that the policies are being applied? What if you run gpresult.exe and rsop.msc? Can you get *any* PC to display a Start Menu that you specify?

Check the event log on a PC which is not performing the redirection. Usually logs something in there which will give an indication to whats happening.

have you checked event viewer on one of the machines to see if any redirection errors is being logged, i had this once turned out to be the permissions on the start menu folder shares
just check the share permissions and nfts permissions on the folders!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by markberry

Organise your PCs in Active Directory by rooms.

Apply a GPO to each of the OUs you have for each room.

In each GPO specify a redirected folder for the Start Menu.

Create each Start Menu in an accessible network location.

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Edit:

If you are doing this on a Per-PC basis, then redirecting the start menu only works for the User, not the PC.

So you would want to modify each GPO to include the following:

Under Computer Config:
Admin Templates:
System/Group Policy:
Policy - User Group Policy Loopback Processing Mode -> Merge.

This should do what you want, redirected start menu based on the PC you login to.

HTH,

Az

Thanks, when you say on each group policy do you mean for example:

Pupils08 (pupils group policy which is applied to the pupils security group) needs to have loopback set in GP and the computer room OU 117N (applied to the computer room) also needs to have Loopback option set., so it's in both ou's or do I just need to set it in the computer room OU policy.


Thanks

Just the computer room OU policies.

Loopback policies take per-user settings and apply them per-computer.
So your target for such a policy is computer objects (usually in their own OU).

It's a nice way to enforce that computers in 1 room have a different look, set of icons, wallpaper etc... than any other room.

You *could* let teachers choose their own wallpaper for a room... but I think that'd be a bit crazy.

Az

Thanks Az

No problems mate - glad it all works :)