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Hawke
Asked: 2020-05-05 03:54:48 +0800 CST

Using environment variable for public desktop path in Windows 10 GPO

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Most of my users' desktop shortcuts are managed by user GPO and they work fine, but I want to use a computer policy to create a shortcut for 'all users' on one machine.

I tried making a computer GPO using both 'Desktop' and 'All Users Desktop' but it doesn't work.

I assume the path to the All Users desktop is C:\Users\Public\Desktop, which the GPO editor says can be accessed using the variable %CommonDesktopDir%. I tried browsing to %CommonDesktopDir%, but the variable doesn't exist on the endpoint.

I am using Windows Server 2016 with Windows 10 endpoints.

Any ideas?

windows group-policy windows-10 windows-server-2016

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Oddly enough, some environment variables seem to have been deprecated. Microsoft's documentation for group policy preference variables lists common desktop, but it is not present or functional on my Win 10 build 1909 machine. The relevant article is an old one, only "Applies To: Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012."

    In lieu of that, you can make use of the %Public% variable, which references the path to the Public profile. To get to the all users desktop you would reference %Public%\Desktop.

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