THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA

Here's another tweak I do when setting up Windows 7.   It makes for a much smoother transition for folks that are used to mapped drives and much smoother when coming from Windows XP and not going through the migration of Vista.  I call it my "link" trick.  First off you map drives for folks using whateve flavor of mapping.  In the Windows 7 era I do not use login scripts but rather now us group policy preferences as it works nicer with SBS 2008 and with my Win7 workstations.  If you still have XP machines (and let's face it we will in our office for some time) you can install the group policy preference extensions on those workstations so that they can use preferences as well.

So now that you've mapped those drives, now I do links and name those mapped drives to something descriptive so the person will see these mapped drives as favorites and will be easily able to navigate.  I'm going to blog pictures on what I'm manually doing so you see the process, see where they end up and how easy it is to build custom link "favorites".

Click on users, then on the user name, then find the Links folder under the users profile. 

Under that Links folder, anything you add in in that links folder ends up on the left hand side window of a file open window.

Right mouse click in that folder and click on new, then shortcut.  Now put in the mapped drive letter (for demo purposes I'll use z:)

Click next to continue

Now comes the point where you can name that mapped drive as well as put a bit of description for folks tailored for them. 

L Drive - Litigation folder is one that we use a lot at my firm.

When you are done, from now on, those mapped drives will show up in the left hand side window under favorites.

Alternatively you can use UNC paths as well here and merely CALL the shortcut a mapped drive to wean people off drive mappings and use UNC paths as well.  But I tell ya, as a fuddy duddy on premises server, mapped drives still play a key part of our firm efficiency and workflow.  We're not yet into UNC paths, even though that map... well... maps to a UNC path on the server.