AppSense Start Menu Taskbar Icon and Toolbar Personalization for Windows 7

AppSense Start Menu /Taskbar Icon and Toolbar Personalization for Windows 7 – To Hive or not to Hive?

Ok, so we want to capture users Taskbar/Start Menu and Toolbar Information on Windows 7? There are 2 ways to do this, either use the in built “Desktop Settings” option to capture the information automatically or hive the items and reg keys out manually with policy. We are going to personalize these settings using reg hive and folder copy actions. At the current time of writing this blog there is no conditional flag (AppSense feature team please can we have one) that can be set on session data or desktop settings. You either have it on or off for your personalization group and we need the conditional flexibility for our environment.

AppSense Start Menu Taskbar Icon and Toolbar Personalization for Windows 7

Many would argue that you should split your personalization groups up if you don’t want to personalize some stuff in the DB for some users. But in this scenario we found it difficult to apply this principal (i’m not going to go into the political detail). I can tell you that we didn’t want to capture any taskbar icons for users who log into our Xenapp Farm – desktop settings allow you to split XP and Win7 file/reg items but not server2008r2 (another feature request please) so anything that gets personalized from their Citrix session gets applied to their Windows 7 session…blahhh.

We found hiving reg keys and folders in at logon and out at logoff the best approach for our environment. We would simply add a condition for Server 2008R2 to not hive or copy folders at logoff – perfect! Other conditions are added that are specific to our environment that I won’t go into detail on just now.

Any how, below are all of the reg keys and appdata locations you will need to create hive actions for if you also decide not to use the  “desktop settings” option in AppSense Environment Manager.

Toolbar Registry Keys / AppData Folders

Taskbar  Registry Keys / AppData Folders

Start Menu  Registry Keys / AppData Folders

AppSense Start Menu /Taskbar Icon and Toolbar Personalization for Windows 7

AppSense Start Menu /Taskbar Icon and Toolbar Personalization for Windows 7

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