Mapping Drives using Group policy preferences

Mapping Drives using Group policy preferences

Are you still using old scripts to map your network drives if so this article will show you how to get away for old scripts and move toward Group Policy Preference for mapping them.

First things first. You need to be running a Windows Vista or Windows 7 computer that has RSAT installed if you need to install it this is the web address.
 
Vista
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=21090

Windows 7
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2009/01/07/using-group-policy-preferences-to-map-drives-based-on-group-membership.aspx

Once you have this install you will need to open up Group Policy Management.

Let’s create a new policy you can name it what you would like but I am going to name it “Drive Mappings” for this article.

After creating the policy let go in and edit it. Right click on the policy you just created and lets click edit

Then you will need to navigate to User configuration \ Preferences \ Windows Settings \ Drive Maps
 
 You then can right click on Drive Maps and select new. Once the box comes up this where all the info is entered.
The in window you will see drop down menu for Action is should have Update as the default. The other options are Create, Replace, Delete. The do what they say. Create: creates the mapped drive for the user. Replace: Replaces the drive every time a user logs in. Delete: deletes the map drive. And Update: will update any changes that you may have made for that drive it also creates it if it is not already created.

For this exercise we are going to be mapping the W  to \\server\share\docs.
 

As you can see I have entered in the info for server location and Label you can make this something easy for your employees to remember if you would like. I have also changed the Drive letter to W. If needed you can put in a username and password if this server may not be on the domain or another username and password is need for the share.

This is about all that you will usually do on this Tab.

If you look at the next tab Common we have a few features that may help you out.

We are mainly going to go over “Remove this item when it is no longer applied’ and “Item-level targeting”

Remove this item when it is no longer applied: is an option that you may want to use if you have user that change job titles a lot.

Item-level Targeting is a good thing to use when you want certain groups to have access to this drive map. It allows you to have one policy but still apply different drive maps to certain groups, OUs , IP address how ever you want to link them.

This should get you start on getting rid of the old scripts and move you towards Mapping Drives using Group Policy preferences.