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Okay.

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Now I'm going to talk about my favourite GP preference area and that's GP drive maps and printer mapping.

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And they are two different areas.

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So I should say my favorite areas.

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But essentially what drive mappings let you do, as the name implies, is map user drives for you and

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see paths.

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So this is a per computer.

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I'm sorry.

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A per user preference only.

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It's found under user configuration.

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Backslash Preferences.

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Backslash windows settings.

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Backslash drive maps.

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And it's really designed very simply to allow you to do those things which you previously had used the

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log on scripts to do.

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So for literally generations it seemed, if not certainly years, we always relied on log on scripts

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to map drives.

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And drive mapping was kind of the fundamental thing you did in log on scripts and now we have preferences

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and it pretty much obviates the need for log on scripts going forward, at least in my estimation.

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And I always encourage people if they've got a lot of log on scripts in their group policy objects to

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look at using GP preferences instead because it's much more manageable and much more predictable in

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its behaviour.

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I will talk in the next module about where, you know, scripts and policy like log on and startup scripts

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still make sense.

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But at the moment I want to talk about GP preferences, drive mappings.

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So again, it allows the mapping of unique paths.

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As you can see here, this is a particular DFS share that I am mapping a public drive to and I can set

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the drive letter.

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So I can said to an absolute drive letter, if I need to know what that drive letter is at all times,

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or I can do the use first available option.

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Now again, the connectors option is shown here has also been deprecated because it again stores the

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password.

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So if you were to use this Kinect as option, know that Microsoft does not guarantee the security of

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that password as it stored in the group policy object.

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We also have a couple options at the bottom of the dialog.

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Hide or show this drive.

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Or hide or show all drives.

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This is a nice little feature if you wanted to hydrides from the user or high drive letters.

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I don't typically recommend it because it doesn't work universally and it just sort of confuses the

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user.

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But if you're in an environment where you need to hide the drive letters, then this is a great place

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to do it.

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The other thing that you can do with drive mappings and item level targeting is again, going back to

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our log on script scenario, lots of log on scripts, would map drives based on group membership.

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You would do some kind of test of membership as the script is executing to determine if the drive gets

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mapped or not.

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Well, you can do this really easily in group policy preferences, and that's what this screenshot is

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showing that it's testing to see if the user is a member of the security group.

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Ah, to test backslash sales users.

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And if they are, then this drive mapping will get processed.

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So again, really straightforward.

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I'm going to take a break now and drop into my demo and show you how this works in practice.