Okay.
Now I'm going to talk about my favourite GP preference area and that's GP drive maps and printer mapping.
And they are two different areas.
So I should say my favorite areas.
But essentially what drive mappings let you do, as the name implies, is map user drives for you and
see paths.
So this is a per computer.
I'm sorry.
A per user preference only.
It's found under user configuration.
Backslash Preferences.
Backslash windows settings.
Backslash drive maps.
And it's really designed very simply to allow you to do those things which you previously had used the
log on scripts to do.
So for literally generations it seemed, if not certainly years, we always relied on log on scripts
to map drives.
And drive mapping was kind of the fundamental thing you did in log on scripts and now we have preferences
and it pretty much obviates the need for log on scripts going forward, at least in my estimation.
And I always encourage people if they've got a lot of log on scripts in their group policy objects to
look at using GP preferences instead because it's much more manageable and much more predictable in
its behaviour.
I will talk in the next module about where, you know, scripts and policy like log on and startup scripts
still make sense.
But at the moment I want to talk about GP preferences, drive mappings.
So again, it allows the mapping of unique paths.
As you can see here, this is a particular DFS share that I am mapping a public drive to and I can set
the drive letter.
So I can said to an absolute drive letter, if I need to know what that drive letter is at all times,
or I can do the use first available option.
Now again, the connectors option is shown here has also been deprecated because it again stores the
password.
So if you were to use this Kinect as option, know that Microsoft does not guarantee the security of
that password as it stored in the group policy object.
We also have a couple options at the bottom of the dialog.
Hide or show this drive.
Or hide or show all drives.
This is a nice little feature if you wanted to hydrides from the user or high drive letters.
I don't typically recommend it because it doesn't work universally and it just sort of confuses the
user.
But if you're in an environment where you need to hide the drive letters, then this is a great place
to do it.
The other thing that you can do with drive mappings and item level targeting is again, going back to
our log on script scenario, lots of log on scripts, would map drives based on group membership.
You would do some kind of test of membership as the script is executing to determine if the drive gets
mapped or not.
Well, you can do this really easily in group policy preferences, and that's what this screenshot is
showing that it's testing to see if the user is a member of the security group.
Ah, to test backslash sales users.
And if they are, then this drive mapping will get processed.
So again, really straightforward.
I'm going to take a break now and drop into my demo and show you how this works in practice.