Customizing the start menu

[Garacesh]

No I would create shared folders for staff and students and redirect to the shared folders.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]36577[/ATTACH]

I'm doing this with students, so their desktop is a read-only network folder that will have certain links on it. Might be a total bum-face and put a link to the school's AUP on their desktop so they can ignore it

 

The issue we would have with that is a lot of staff and students save pretty much ALL of their work in their desktop folders... even though we try and drill it into their heads that they shouldn't be doing this...

Same here with staff. Currently if a child saves something to their desktop and logs off, the file vanishes into the ether ne'er to be retrieved. I personally do not like this. If they're not supposed to be saving there, then they shouldn't be able to save there, which is why I'm redirecting their desktops in the way I am doing. For staff, though, as you said they have half their work on there, so we have their homeshare mapped as a drive, and their desktop just becomes Drive:\Desktop.

 

Everybody (kids, staff, etc) get Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc etc, all the standard library folders, redirected to their homedrive, too (so Drive:\ is documents, Drive:\Pictures is 'My Pictures', etcetera)

[fleXx]

If you manage to get SIMS pinned, please let me know how you did it

I can't get this working because SIMS isn't installed at the point of the start menu layout being applied. I've tried adding a shortcut to the application and placing that in the start menu and was hopeful but that didn't seem to work either ><

 

I've seen lots of people using classic shell but like you said Michael, its not ideal. I don't really like the idea of using a third-party tool to manage something that should be easily manageable as its part of the OS.

 

Shimmer45: You could try using DesktopApplicationLinkPath instead of the applicationID? Just point the DesktopApplicationLinkPath to a shortcut that's placed in %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories.

 

If anyone is still struggling with this - we found that changing the shortcut location from %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\ instead, actually resolved the pinning of apps for us. Using this method, we can now pin IE and various other apps that we were struggling with

 

We managed to pin sims buy just copying the Pulsar.exe to C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS .net\ (creating the directory if it doesn't exist) and creating a shortcut to it and placing it in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs, and pinning that.

Hope this helps someone!

Edited May 9, 2016 by fleXx

[Jawloms]

Yeah, I've encountered both Notepad and IE being temperamental about being pinned, so I've left them out. I just have MSOffice, Calculator, Snipping tool and MSPaint. I could do different XML's for different departments (have Art and ICT have the Adobe Suite pinned, have Technology pin our 3D CAD software, 2D design software, etc) but that's not really worth the hassle for a small UI tweak. The redirected start menu is working fine, so just like Windows 7, they'll just have some icons that don't work and some that do depending on which machine they're using. It's not perfect, but it works. Kids are fairly understanding of the fact that Google Earth isn't on the Art computers, and the English laptops can't be used to draw up a plan for laser cutting.. etc)

 

unfortunately breaks our layout Removing the offending line makes it work again. I've also tried adding one step from the bottom (above ) to no avail.

For reference:

 

Edit: Annoyingly the ruddy calculator icon isn't showing up now, either :/

 

I had exactly this. Now solved it if it's any use to you;

 

If you have "Remove common program groups from Start Menu" enabled in group policy, it prevents the tiles appearing.