Teacher's Group Policies under wirless

[ChrisH]

Sorry i meant the specific start menu setting. What I am trying to determine is if you have tried to set it to something else or left it blank.

[BooBoo]

Desktop
Setting: Basic (Redirect everyone's folder to the same location)hide
Path: \\Asc-dc-01\profiles$\teacherdesktop

Options
Grant user exclusive rights to Desktop Disabled
Move the contents of Desktop to the new location Disabled
Policy Removal Behavior Leave contents

My Documents
Setting: Basic (Redirect everyone's folder to the same location)hide
Path: \\%HOMESHARE%%HOMEPATH%

Options
Grant user exclusive rights to My Documents Enabled
Move the contents of My Documents to the new location Disabled
Policy Removal Behavior Leave contents

Start Menu
Setting: Basic (Redirect everyone's folder to the same location)hide
Path: \\Asc-dc-01\Menus$\Start Menus\Teachers

Options
Grant user exclusive rights to Start Menu Disabled
Move the contents of Start Menu to the new location Disabled
Policy Removal Behavior Leave contents

The above is set in the User Configuration of the Staff OU

[ChrisH]

How have you changed it in the loopback policy though? This part specifically

Start Menu
Setting: Basic (Redirect everyone's folder to the same location)hide
Path: \\Asc-dc-01\Menus$\Start Menus\Teachers

[BooBoo]

Hi It was set to replace but nothing has been specifed to replace

[ChrisH]

Ok so its set to not configured then? Also have you ticked the box on the setting tab that says

redirect the folder back to the user profile when policy is removed?

If you have done all that then try setting the policy to some like redirect to:

%userprofile%/start menu

Sometimes with GP if you do nothing it just keeps the settings. If you try and replace them with something else you may have more luck.

Also make sure you have the setting "Wait for the network" which will be machine setting to give you a better chance of the GPOs getting read properly during startup.

If your still struggling I have an idea for a script which will be fairly short.

[BooBoo]

Thanks for all your help ChrisH. I'll try that over the rest of today and tomorrow. If i have no joy can I post again Tuesday pm or Thursday?

[ChrisH]

Sure I am at work all week so will be checking the forum regularly

[ajbritton]

If all this GP twiddling fails, here's another way you could do it...

1 - Redirect all Start Menus to C:\StartMenu (or anything on the local PC) - Do this for ALL USERS.

2 - Apply a startup script to the desktop machines OU which copies the managed start menu from the network down to C:\StartMenu. (This can be done if you include the files being copied in the actual GPO alongside the script)

3 - Apply a startup script to the laptops OU which simply copies the contents of the original start menu (%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Start Menu) to C:\StartMenu

This way you still take control of the Start Menu contents. Too whacky?

[ChrisH]

Number 3 is what I was going to do with the script pretty much.

[Norphy]

I had a problem fairly similar to this a while ago.

We're in the process of deploying a terminal server. I wanted the standard student policy to be applied to the terminal server but I also wanted an additional policy to be applied to users logged onto the terminal but not those who were logged onto standard workstations.

I tried farting around with loopback policies with very limited success. Sometimes they worked, more frequently they didn't. So I had an idea: WMI filters!

On the student OU, there are two policies: The standard one which applies to both terminal server users and fat client users. The second one only applies to the terminal server. The second one has a WMI filter attached to it which looks for the serial number of the machine they're logging onto. If it matches the TS's serial number, it applies; if not it doesn't.

Try something similar. I don't know the specifics of your network, what brands of PCs you use or whatever but there must be a WMI setting somewhere where you can differentiate between your workstations and your laptops. Hell, you could probably do it by machine name alone.

[ChrisH]

Machine names was going to be the basis of my script but a WMI filter is an excellent idea if it works as expected.

[Ric_]

Just a thought about the laptops... you could do what I do and have a shortcut on your teacher start menu to 'Locally Installed Apps'. This is a folder on the server that is synchronised to make it available offline. Each laptop has its own folder for all those daft apps that come with each particularly sub-model of laptop.

Hosting the folders on the server means that you can drop stuff in when you need to and they will be picked up when the client next connects. I found a simple batch file to pick up the correct folder worked best:

explore.exe \\servername\sharename\%computername%