The other day I wrote an article on how I use Group Policy Preferences to Deploy Printers and Set the Default Printer. Today I wanted to share with you how I go about mapping network drives to particular users based on their AD DS Group Memberships. In days gone by this was don via a vbs login in script, but let me show you how this can be done via GPP.

Simple scenario, we have a group of Media students that need a drive mapped to a different “Media Backup Server”, so what I have done is put these students into and Active Directory Group called “Media Students”.

So in my Students GPO I simply went to User Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings > Drive Maps

Right Click Drive Maps and select New > Mapped Drive Select Create from the drop down menu, enter the path to the share (eg. \\server\share ), I have created folders that relate to the students username therefore I used the %username% variable, select the Drive Letter.

Then from the Common tab up the top tick Item Level Targeting, from the New Item Menu select Security Group, make sure User In Group is selected in the bottom window and browse for the Security Group that the user must be a member of.

All Done, now all students that are a member of the Media Security Group will get an M Drive Mapped.

Cheers

Daniel Anderson
Loving Group Policy Preferences