Mapping network drives with Group Policy

Almost everyone uses mapped drives of some flavor in their networks. Creating drive mappings manually as part of a new user startup process is cumbersome and unnecessary. It is also work that will probably need to be duplicated as users move from one computer to another in the future. If we utilize Group Policy to centralize the creation of these drive mappings, we can ensure that the same users get the same drive mappings wherever they log into the network. Planned correctly, you can enable these mappings so that they appear on any domain-joined system across the network by the user simply logging into the computer like they always do. This is a good, simple first task to accomplish within Group Policy to get our feet wet and to learn something that could turn out to be useful in your organization.

Getting ready

This recipe will be accomplished from a Windows 10 computer with RSAT installed, connected to a Windows Server 2019 domain....