So let's have some fun with drive mapping policy.
So I'm going to go ahead and I've created a GPO and I'm going to go ahead and edit it.
And I'm going to set user configuration preferences, control panel settings and sorry, windows settings,
drive maps.
And I'm going to go ahead and create a new map drive.
And the location is going to be a DFS share that I have.
And it's called are two test scuttled.
Backslash user backslash public.
And I'm going to label it as the public drive so that everyone knows when they map out what they're
getting.
And I'm going to say reconnected, log on and I'm going to say use the P drive and I'm going to leave
all the other options alone, except what I'm going to do is come in under item level targeting and
I'm going to create an item level target and I'm going to say do security group and I'm going to browse
to the sales users group, just type in sales and it'll return all the groups that start with sales.
I'm going to pick the sales users group.
So what I'm saying is if the user is in the group, then this evaluates to true and the preference should
apply.
And I'm going to go ahead and set that and it's set to update.
That means it's going to map the driver once and then not keep trying to map it every time I log on.
And that'll be a good thing.
It'll take less time to get to the user's desktop that way.
If I were to put it on replace mode, then every time the user logged on it would remove the map, drive
and re-edit.
So now I have my map drive defined for all members of the Sales Users Group.
Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to link this to my sales users.
Oh, you saw it will take effect.
And then I'm going to go over to my Windows client.
Now I'm logged into this Windows seven client as Joe Sales.
And if you'll recall from an earlier module, I mentioned that Preferences Drive Mappings was one of
those client side extensions that requires a foreground synchronous refresh, just like software installation
or folder redirection.
So I'm just going to confirm I don't have any drive mappings available right now.
I got this one here, but I'm going to go ahead and disconnect.
And I got a nice, clean environment, no drive mappings.
I'm going to go ahead and bring up my command prompt and type update and target the user because this
is a per user preference that I'm getting and I'm going to tell it that essentially I want to get this
drive mapping.
Now again, note that it's telling me that in this case I still have a folder redirection, policy error
or policy message telling me that I've got some client side extensions that need to do foreground work.
So great.
I knew that.
And I knew that I need to do for preferences or I'm sorry for drive mappings.
I need to log off and log back on.
So I'm going to go ahead and do that.
One thing to note about that, log off and log back on requirement for preferences.
Drive mappings in Windows 8.1 and above that requirement actually goes away.
So if this were a Windows 8.1 or Windows ten system and I had just done the update, if I came into
the Explorer and went to my computer, I would see the drive mapping to the public drive that I had
specified in the preference without having me log off and log back on.
So of course this is Windows seven, so I am going to go ahead and log off.
And now I'm logging back on and you'll see it's applying group policy drive maps.
It went by pretty quickly.
And I'm going to bring up the Explorer.
Go to computer.
And there's my public drive.
So it's been mapped.
It's called public drive.
And there's nothing in it right now.
But it's essentially named it for me and done the mapping for me to that DFC share.
So I was able to seamlessly get to my drive maps and because I was a member of the sales users group,
IT process that preference just fine.
Now I wanted to bring up one thing that you may have seen in some of my past demos and wondered how
it got there.
You'll notice when I was logging in that you were seeing messages flash across the screen showing you
which policy area was processing as I was logging in.
And that's actually controlled by a group policy setting, and it's an admin template setting that you
can set.
And I tend to set it on all the machines in my domain because there is generally it's great information
to have to know what's going on as the users logging on.
It's under computer configuration admin template system.
And if I go down, you'll see this policy called verbose versus normal status messages.
If you enabled this policy.
Then those verbose messages will appear when the user logs on or when the machine starts up or shuts
down.
So you'll be able to see the progress of, in this case, group policy processing.
And I know this has nothing to do with what I was just talking about with preferences drive mappings.
But I think it's useful to have this information to know about this policy, because it can help us
see that in this case, group policy preferences drive mappings was actually running at that last log
on.