Create Favorites for Internet Explorer 10 Using Group Policy

I know Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 have both been out for a while, but I also know a lot of administrators out there are trying to hold off as long as possible on deploying them into their environments.  I know I have been, because IE 10 breaks a number of older line-of-business applications that work fine in IE 6, 7, 8, and 9.  Of course, if these applications could be upgraded to a more recent version that supports IE 10, that would be great, but that's not always possible.  However, that doesn't mean you aren't testing Windows 8 and IE 10 in your test labs (even if that is just some virtual machines and old clunky boxes you rescued from a junk pile).

One of the first, and most frustrating, things I noticed about IE 10 is that installing it takes away the "Internet Explorer Maintenance" section from the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC or gpmc.msc to those of us who've been around for a while).  This was particularly frustrating to me because I use this area to define Favorites for my users.

It took a little bit of time with Google and putting the pieces together, but I found how to work around this annoyance.  The answer is Group Policy Preferences (GPP).  The beauty of this solution is that it should work with any IE version, as long as the OS supports Group Policy Preferences.  That means you need XP SP2 or 2003 SP1 or newer and The KB943729 GPP Client Side Extensions (CSE) Update if applicable.  Windows 7, 8, 2008, 2008 R2, and 2012 do not require this update.  If you still have Windows 2000 workstations, this won't work there, as the GPP CSEs are not available there.  Now that you have your clients ready for this, let's get to the actual policy creation bit.

For this example, I'm going to create a new Group Policy Object (GPO) for testing, called "IE 10 Favorites," and link it to the root of my testing domain.  An illustrative image:

Now I'm going to right-click the GPO and select "Edit" so I can actually put some settings in there.  Expand the "User Configuration" node in the tree at the left, then expand "Preferences" and "Windows Settings" to see the areas to use.

If you want to create folders in the Favorites menu/pane, you'll need to use the "Folders" option that you see in the left pane of the Group Policy Editor.  Click it and you'll see the right pane of the window change to reflect that you're in the GPP Folders section.  Right-click in the white area there, point to "New," then select "Folder."  Since you want to create the folder within Favorites, enter the path as %FavoritesDir%\FolderName in the "Path" field.  In the example below, I used "%FavoritesDir%\Test Favorites" for the name.  I chose the "Create" actoion here, as it made more sense than "Update" would have, although both would have worked.  The promised example:

Click OK to save the setting.

Now to actually create the Favorites themselves.  This one gets a bit tedious and repetitive.  In the left pane of the Group Policy Editor, select "Shortcuts."  Right-click on the white area in the right pane, point to "New," and select "Shortcut."  I created two to illustrate how the folders work.  Set the Action to "Update" to fix the Favorite automatically in the event a user edits it.  Don't set the Name quite yet.  Set the Target Type to "URL" and the Location to "Explorer Favorites" first, otherwise the changes will wipe out whatever you've typed for the Name.  Now you can enter the Name.  For my first shortcut, I used "Google" for the name, then set the Target URL to "http://www.google.com/".  I didn't change any other options.  Click OK to save the shortcut configuration.

To create the favorite inside a folder, I created another shortcut here in the Group Policy Editor.  This time, though, I used "Test Favorites\Gmail" for the Name and "https://www.gmail.com/" for the Target URL.  Another illustration:

Once the GPO is created, wait for it to replicate to your other domain controllers (you do have more than one, don't you?  And yes, I'll forgive only one DC in a test lab!).  Replication should be complete within the Active Directory site within 15 minutes, or 5 minutes if you have only two DC's.  Now log onto a workstation as a user that the policy will apply to.  Verify that the favorites were created.  If they weren't, run "gpupdate /force" to force the workstation to reapply its Group Policy settings.

If you see something similar to this, you did it right.

Enjoy the torture of migrating your old settings to this new method, because it will definitely take you a while!