Active directory

Ive been working on the same kinda thing from home here is what i found.

My advice is to dovetail these desktop policies with your broader company policies. For instance, if you have a company directive that everyone should clear their desk every night, then Group Policies such as 'Hide All Items on the Desktop' will reinforce the corporate message. As a matter of tactics, you could create OU's for laptops, desktops and servers and then assign different desktop Group Policies for each type of machine.

As with the Start Menu policies, there are half a dozen objects where you can 'Remove' icons from the user's vision. For Example, remove the My Computer, My Documents and the Recycle Bin. When you have finished Removing, you can start on Hiding. For Example * 'Hide Internet Explorer on the Desktop' (If you enable this setting, then I would keep the IE icon on the Taskbar)

One setting that I can recommend is * 'Prohibit users from changing My Documents path'. This would compliment the policy which redirects the My Documents to a network share.

Another policy that is worth a look is: - * 'Do not add shares of recently opened documents to My Network Places'.

If the machine is that famous communal Kiosk, then the setting: 'Do not save setting on exit', makes sense. For all other machines, this setting will only infuriate users - so I would avoid it!

I have yet to find a use for 'Remove the Desktop Cleanup Wizard', however, every time that I am rude about a Group Policy setting a 'Mr Angry' emails me with a killer reason why you need that particular setting.