Using Group Policy to hide and map specified drives

Do you remember the old days when we used the hide drives.adm template to hide specified drives along with some kind of hide drives calculator to get the proper value ? So if we wanted to hide drives for Domain Users but not the Domain Admins, we had to create another policy to lock it up again. Those days are long gone thanks to Group Policy Preferences, for me it’s the life before and after. Get rid of all your adm templates and 30+ page vbs logon scripts once for all. This will speed up the logon time and make your administration much easier.

To leverage Group Policy Preferences (GPP) you’ll need to administrate Group Policy’s from a Windows 2008 server (just member server) or Windows 7 with RSAT. On Windows XP and Windows 2003 machines you’ll need Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions to properly read GPP settings.

Map network drives :

Open Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) and create a new policy. Browse to User Configuration – Preferences – Windows Settings – Drive Maps

In this example we map K: to the Accounting folder for all users member of the Accounting group. It’s possible to create many rules, if member of group A or B or and so on.

Hide Drives :

In this example we hide C: for all users except for Domain Admins. When you start playing around we GPP you’ll learn how really powerful it is. I highly recommend you start following Group Policy Center for weekly tips.

So here’s what I want you to do now :

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