Background: I am making a GPO with desktop shortcuts for users. The GPO has a few links to websites like our help desk that it places. It also has a shortcut to a network location for a file share.
The Issue: The shortcuts that go to URLs apply just fine. The one that goes to the network location doesn't work. The offending one is, as far as I can tell, configured entirely correctly.
Here you can see the configuration:
The shortcut path is \\SERVER. Using the same configuration, I was able to make it work with \\SERVER\SUBFOLDER, but can't get it to work with the top level.
On the client computer I see this error:
What I've Tried: When I research this issue I found a lot of people saying it an issue with the security context so I tried checking/unchecking the Security Context settings in the common tab for the shortcut and running a gpupdate /force. I also found people saying that it might not like the name of the server, but that can't be it because it resolves subfolders.
What I Want: I want to be able to map this shortcut directly to \\SERVER directly with group policy. I can't map it to a subfolder and deploy it because of the way the server is configured for files. I know that I could deploy it with a login script that just places a shortcut on the desktop, but I'd like to keep everything vanilla group policy.
Best Answer
My guess is that it's because
\\serverisn't technically a UNC path for which a file system object shortcut can be created. A UNC path must contain at least two path components, such as\\server\share.If
\\serverisn't a valid UNC path then I don't see how you can make it work as is, but there's nothing stopping you from manually creating the shortcut and then copying the shortcut to the client machines with GPP.https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc227007.aspx