Add Network Location to My Computer (Group Policy)

Question

The shares at my company are becoming unwieldy and we have now officially ran out of letters to map shares to having exhausted A, B, H-Z. Not all of our users need access to some of these shares, but there are enough people who need access to enough different shares that we can't simply recycle letters for them which are used by other shares. At this point we're going to need to start moving shares over to network locations.

Adding a network location shortcut on My Computer isn't difficult, I right click and use the Wizard, but how do I do it through Group Policy? I don't want to have to set up 100 or so computers manually

Answer 1

This absolutely can be done using only existing Group Policy preferences, but it's a little tedious.

Background Info

When you create a network location shortcut it actually creates three things.

1. A read-only folder with the name of your network shortcut
2. A target.lnk within that folder with your destination

3. A desktop.ini file that contains the following

   [.ShellClassInfo]
   CLSID2={0AFACED1-E828-11D1-9187-B532F1E9575D}
   Flags=2
   

I found this information on this Spiceworks community forum post.

How to make it happen

I figured out how to do this from a comment in the same forum post linked above.

You need to create four settings in a group policy. All of the settings are located in the group policy editor under: User Configuration>Preferences>Windows Settings as seen in this image.

Folders Setting

Add a new folder with preference with the following settings as seen in this image.

Path: %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts\SHARENAME
Read-only checked

Ini Files Settings

There are two setting that you must make in this setting, as seen in this image.

1. Create one for the CLSID2 settings image

   File Path: %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts\SHARENAME\desktop.ini
   Section Name: .ShellClassInfo
   Property Name: CLSID2
   Property Value: {0AFACED1-E828-11D1-9187-B532F1E9575D}
   

2. And another for the Flags setting image

   File Path: %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts\SHARENAME\desktop.ini
   Section Name: .ShellClassInfo
   Property Name: Flags
   Property Value: 2
   

Shortcuts Setting

Add a new shortcut preference with the following settings image

Name: %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts\SHARENAME\target
Target type: File System Object
Location: <Specify full path>
Target path: SHARETARGET

Closing Notes

This will work to create the network location using group policy. I would recommend using item level targeting to keep all of your network locations in one group policy.

It can be a handful to manage all of these separate preferences, so I created an application to help with managing the shares, and the user security group filters. Here is my application on github, you must create the first share using the settings above, but the application can handle adding more shares, deleting shares, and updating existing shares.

Answer 2

You can make a bat script which you can add to startup policy to run:

net use <driver letter> \\<servername>\<sharename> /user:<username> <password>

Example:

    @echo off
    net use w: \\server /user:Test TestPassword

And this will add on every computer a network shortcut to \\server with letter W .
And you can modify to make some this only on some computers or users. Let's say you want only on user 'MikeS' to run this command, so you put something like that:

IF %USERNAME% == 'MikeS'(
    net use w: \\server /user:Test TestPassword
)