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Forcing a home page

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How does one force an IE home page via Group Policy?

I think I know theoretically how to do it, but it just doesn’t seem to work as my scripting skills seem inadequate to edit a suitable .inf file.

I can’t roll out SharePoint until I can make this happen, and I have way too many users to do it manually.

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I should probably add it’s a NT5 domain with all XP clients.

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have you checked out ie zak available from downloads at http://www.microsoft.com

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ZAK comes in 2 flavors, Win95 and NT, neither of which we use.

I need to do it in Group Policy to save me 10+ hours of work.

It’s in Group Policy/User Configuration/Internet Explorer Maintenance/Important URL’s

But it doesn’t “take” on anyone’s profile unless you force a new .inf file under /IEM/Connection/Automatic Browser Configuration

What’s the magic line of code in the .inf file I’m missing?

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What is it you are trying to do?, write a script that would set ones home page or configure it correctly in AD/Group policy?

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If you are trying to script it why not try writing a .reg file that calls on the registry key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
“Start Page”=”http://whateverhomepageistobe.com”

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If you are trying to do it through AD/Group Policy, you are in the right spot; IEM\User Configuration\Internet Explorer Maintenance\Important URLs. You can immediately refresh the Group Policy by running either:
Computer: C:\>secedit /refreshpolicy machine_policy /enforce or
User: C:\>secedit /refreshpolicy user_policy /enforce

Also, you may want to also consider disabling the Change homepage option under User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Internet Explorer\

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I already have gpupdate /force in everyone’s login script.
It just doesn’t work unless you write a custom Internet Signup .ins and point to it in /IEM/Connection/Automatic Browser Configuration.
(in fact, once a user has logged in and opened IE for the first time, none of the GP settings in IE Maintenence work without the .ins file OR a redirect to a JS,JVS or .PAC proxy page).

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I know exactly what you are dealing with because I had to work on it myself. The solution is the Internet Explorer Administration Kit from Microsoft. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ieak/default.mspx and you can download the IEAK tool. This is a wizard based tool that creates .ins files. It does a bunch of other things too but for waht you want to achieve, the .ins file alone is sufficient. There is a lot of documentation about the IEAK on the Microsoft tech net area.

You can go crazy with the Internet Explorer Customization Wizard, or you can simply use the profile manager which creates .ins files.

Anyways, after using the wizard to create your .ins file (which is simply a txt file) you can place it on an internally available web server. Then use the group policy object and set User Configuration\Windows Settings\Internet Explorer Maintenance\Connection\Automatic Browser Configuration with the auto-config URL like: http://intranet.domain.local/ieadmin.ins. Check both boxes for “auto detect” and “enable auto config” and this shoudl do the trick. You may have to gpupdate of course, but from your posts, you already know what you need to do for group policy and for gpupdate.

Hope this helps,
Chris Britt

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The ieak was VERY helpful…as was enabling loopback processing in GP. Apparently none of the user settings were being applied. Thanks for the help!

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