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Windows 10 Professional and pinning task bar items

It still bothers me that pinning shortcuts to the taskbar as part of the imaging process for all users, has become such a bother.. particularly when using Windows 10 Pro. Firstly, anyone who has works with Windows 10 Enterprise needn't worry about this post, as you can simply set your start menu layout, export the layout to an XML file using Powershell and then edit that XML to include the taskbar settings. This can then be deployed to your endpoint machines via GPO. Simple! For those looking for the documentation, it can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/windows-10-start-layout-options-and-policies Of course, if you're using Windows 10 Professional, this becomes problematic.. as the moment you add the taskbar component of that XML file, applying it via GPO causes explorer.exe to end up in an endless crash/restart/crash loop. You can however, still apply your start layout this way without any issues (just don't change the XML file aft...
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Taming Microsoft Edge - Setting a corporate intranet page as start page and home page via GPO

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Microsoft Edge – love it or hate it, it’s part of the Windows world, and one we all need to accept as an annoying aspect of building SOE images.  As anyone who knows how our end users know, most users don’t actually realise that newly styled ‘E’ on their taskbar is actually edge, not a refreshed icon for IE. Recently, it became apparent that while I had not planned that our end users would use edge, they still do! So, I had to work out a way to set the homepage at a GPO level to our local intranet. Seems simple – there’s bound to be a GPO for that – wrong! For whatever reason, you can set the start page via GPO to any website you’d like via the Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Microsoft Edge > Configure Start Pages GPO – and this works – when you launch Edge, sure enough your so-called ‘start page’ directs to your site of choice. However, the moment you click on the ‘Home Button’ you get redirected to msn.c...
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