One of the assets that our district lacks is software that is installed on the Windows 10 workstations. This is due to the fact that they district has moved over to be a Google District and most of the software that is used are apps that are within the G-suite. With this in mind, we decided to try to add shortcuts to web based URLs that they students can use to access software or web resources on the workstations.
To accomplish this, we basically add the short cuts into a GPO that we created and it is linked to the student computer GPO. To add a new shortcut to all of the student computers that points to a web link:
Create an ICON (or .ico) file for the shortcut.
If you don’t do this step, then the icon will be an icon associated with the default browser. For better appearance, and to have the URLs appear to be links to software, we wanted to create custom Icons for the links. Here is how you do that:
1. Find an image for the icon and download to a temp directory.
2. Connect to the website: http://icoconvert.com/ and convert the image to an .ico file.
3. Copy that .ico file over to: \\tpaw-01\installs\DesktopBackground\Icons
You will reference the icon in the next step.
Add the Shortcut to the GPO
1. Open the Group Policy Editor
2. Edit the Start Menu Web Links GPO
3. Browse to Computer \ Preferences \ Windows Settings \ Shortcuts
4. Add the new URL
In this example:
Name – The URL will appear in the start menu alphabetically. Most of our students know about the on-line grades system as “Progress Book” so, we began the name with that.
Target Type – URL
Location – All Users Start Menu (If you just select start menu, it will only add it for new users on the computer)
Icon file page – Put in the UNC file path to the custom icon you made earlier.
CLICK ON THE COMMON TAB
Make sure you check the Remove this item when it is no longer applied – What this will do is if you change or delete the URL, it will be removed from the workstations. If this is not checked, the URL will remove on the computers even if you delete it or change it.
You can now go to a machine and do a GPUPDATE to check to make sure the link was deployed and that it works properly.