Intro
In a previous article, we walked you through setting up a shared network folder using Active Directory. While your users should be able to access that folder, they find it's a bit cumbersome to locate. Here, we'll walk you through mapping this folder as a drive, which will make it must easier and faster for your users to locate in File Explorer - no need to remember ugly UNC paths!
Steps
1. Open Group Policy Management on your domain controller (DC)
2. Navigate to the Organizational Unit (OU) you want this GPO to apply to
3. Right-click on the OU and click "Create a GPO in this domain, and Link it here"
4. Give your GPO a name. For our example, we'll call it "Map HR Share"
5. Right-click on the newly created GP and click "Edit..."
6. Navigate to User Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings > Drive Maps
7. In Drive Maps, right-click in the center of the screen and select New > Mapped Drive
8. In the New Drive Properties dialog, enter the Location as the UNC path of your shared folder (in our example, "\\WIN-DC1\HR Files"), provide a "Label as" value (we're using "HR Files") and then select a drive letter to use (we're using "H:"). Use caution and ensure that there are no other GPO's in your domain also mapping a drive to this same letter, as they will be overwritten by the last applied policy.
9. Click "OK" and exit the Group Policy Management Editor
Security Filtering: If you have other users in the OU that you don't want this to apply to, we need to change the settings to make sure we only target the correct security group
11. Click on your GPO and select the "Delegation" Tab
12. In the bottom-right corner, click "Advanced..."
13. In the dialog that opens, highlight "Authenticated Users" and un-check the "Apply group policy" under the "Allow" column, but leave the "Read" permission. Curious why? See this article from Microsoft.
14. Now, click "Add..." and enter the name of the security group that you want this GPO to apply to and click "OK"
15. Highlight the security group, and make sure that the "Read" and "Apply group policy" permissions are checked to "Allow"
16. Click "OK". You can now exit Group Policy Management.
17. (Optional) Log in as a user in the organizational unit (or security group if filtered as explained above) and open File Explorer. Check that the drive has been mapped. Note: your users will need to log out and back in (or reboot) for the drive mapping to take effect.
Conclusion
Simple as that! We hope this tutorial was helpful and as always, please reach out to Cosmistack for all of your infrastructure management and consulting needs! Thanks for reading!
