SharedPC without Intune

[synaesthesia]

Hi all,

 

For reasons it's not worth going into, I need to try and set up SharedPC mode this summer, or something to approximate it. We'll be moving to that via Intune in due course, however until that happens I'd like to give users are very similar experience with our Windows 11 rollout. The biggest thing I want to achieve is no local storage. Whilst this could likely be done with fancy permissions, I'd like to block as many entry points as possible, very notably the local library links in the navigation pane of Explorer (Desktop, My Documents, My Pictures etc).

There's a load of registry tweaks which don't work (mostly all deleting keys or setting hiddenbydefault=1 for those namespace entries under their respective GUIDs), and wondered if anyone had achieved anything similar.

In a nutshell, all that should available locally is the downloads folder - everything else is done via Google Drive & DriveFS.

 

[mjhardisty]

Sounds like you might have to build a provisioning package in Windows Configuration Designer if you aren't using Intune. I think the Shared PC policies are exposed if you use that utility.

My solution through Intune, which hopefully it will mirror, is that users only have access to Documents, Desktop, etc and no other folder and these are silently moved to OneDrive. Any save to "Documents" is automatically saved into OneDrive.

[synaesthesia]

Cheers. I managed to finagle it in the end by just calling the relevant WMI bits from powershell, however found it breaks Google Drive, so appears to be a no go. Playing with permissions instead for now!

[mjhardisty]

That sounds complex!