The Start Menu allows for Shortcut Icons to be delivered to All Users or Per User.
It also allows for users to PIN their favourite shortcuts to either the start menu or taskbar or both.
All Users
Shortcuts are stored in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu
Per User Start Menu
Shortcuts are stored in C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu
Pinned Items
Pinned items are stored in the file system and the registry.
%AppData%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar
%AppData%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\StartMenu
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Taskband
Common Practice With Appsense Personalization
Pinned Items
Appsense Personalization has a option to save users Pinned items. This is called "TaskBar and StartMenu" under Windows Personalization.
This saves the pinned icons to the Personalization database.
All Users
The all users icons are stored at a machine level and as such are not touched by Appsense. This can potentially be an issue for licensed software. In this event ideally software packages should not deploy application icons and the icons can be delivered with an appsense EM policy. I think that only software that has a user based license control should have its icons delivered with a policy. There is an overhead in managing icons this way and so keeping this to a minimum keeps your system optimised. Obviously Appsense AM can also perform more application control than simply not giving a user an icon as mentioned here.
Per User
If Per user shortcuts are to be persisted then there are two options.
Redirection of the users Start Menu is the most common. Simply use Policy to redirect the users start menu to a network location.
Redirection of the users Start Menu is the most common. Simply use Policy to redirect the users start menu to a network location.
An alternative then is to use a logon and logoff trigger to mirror the location to a network share
To Cater for Offline use case the Offline Files option on the redirection can be used. This keeps a copy of the redirected files in C:\windows\csc.
To Cater for Offline use case the Offline Files option on the redirection can be used. This keeps a copy of the redirected files in C:\windows\csc.
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