Setting up Mapped Drives in Group Policy without a Logon Script

If you are pretty familiar with Active Directory, you already know that you can easily configure a Home Drive for a User by opening up the Properties for a User and clicking on the Profile tab:

However, what you may not know is that you can configure additional Mapped Drives for a User without using a Logon Script!

Here's how you do it:

1. Publish all of your Shares/Shared Folders to Active Directory to their respective containers/OUs (http://samirvaidya.blogspot.com/2013/04/publishing-shared-folders-to-active.html)
2. Open up the Group Policy Management Console
3. Go to the Domain/Group Policy that you want to edit (many organizations will simply alter the Default Domain Policy)
4. Under the Settings tab, right click on Windows Settings and select the Edit menu
5. This will open the Group Policy Management Editor
6. Since you will be configuring this on a User basis, expand the User Configuration-->Preferences-->Windows Settings node
7. Select the Drive Maps node
8. Right click in the Drive Maps pane and select New-->Mapped Drive
9. Once the New Drive Properties dialog displays, click on the button next to the Location textbox to browse for a Shared Folder
10. Once you find your Published Shared Folder, right click on the name and choose the Select menu option
11. Now that the drive has been selected, you can optionally add a Label to the Shared Folder
12. You can then select a Drive Letter to be assigned for the newly Mapped Drive
13. When you are done entering all of the options for the Mapped Drive, click on the OK button

If everything was configured correctly, the next time your users log on to the domain, they should be able to view these additional Mapped Drives in Windows Explorer!