Hi
Today I will talk a small tip to be transparent to the users, and thus to enhance a tip I already gave in the past, as seen there; Windows 2019 RDS | Publishing RADC shortcut on the Desktop
In my older blog post I was creating a shortcut to only the RADC’s folder from the start menu, but on the desktop.
Today I wanted to be more granular and create shortcut for each applications on the user desktop. The user experience is greatly enhanced that way.
It’s a 3 steps GPO to do, but first we need to generate our .ico and .rdp’s files to use.
Go inside a computer that as the RADC’s farm installed correctly, and navigate inside the folder; %AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Work Ressources (RADC)
From there select the shortcut you want to deploy, like Word, and click property.
From the property windows, check the path of the argument, it’s where our .rdp and .ico are. The shortcut created are just mstsc.exe “path/to/local profile/”. It should be a path liks, %AppData%\Roaming\Microsoft\Workspaces\{….-….-….-….}\Ressources\Word.rdp”
Copy the .RDP you want and the associated .ICO, which are cached there too.
I usually copy them to a folder where all computer can read, like a sub folder in NETLOGON.
From there we start our GPO.
1. Create a GPO, in my example, “RADC – Desktop Word shortcut”
2. Create a file copy to copy the .rdp. Under user\Preference\Windows parameters\Files. The source is like \\dc\netlogon\source\Word.rdp, the destination is a administrative folder on the computer, like c:\it\word.rdp.
3. Create a file copy to copy the .ico. Same source and destination’s folder as the previous one.
4. After that we create a shortcut, under preference too.
We use target as %DesktopDir%\Word, target; c:\it\Word.rdp, and we select the the target icon as c:\it\Word.ico.
I use to copy the files for a reason, if you DC become available for a short period of time, it’s more efficient to simply copy the files locally and create a shortcut to those local’s files.
5. After that we use the same security to apply this GPO’s to as the group you make Word visible with in your RADC’s console.
Voila, the shortcut should be visible easily after that. It’s more work in the start, but after that it’s less call to find the resource in my own opinion.
Thanks for the reading
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