Mapping network drives with Group Policy

Almost everyone uses mapped drives of some flavor in their environments. Creating drive mappings manually as part of a new user start-up process is cumbersome and unnecessary. It is also work that will likely 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 to appear on any domain joined system across the network by the user simply logging in to the computer as 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

We are using a Server 2012 R2 Domain Controller in our environment in order to create and configure this Group Policy Object. We will assume that...