Set up multiple homepages using group policy using IE7

After much thought about the hard-coded static initial homepage requirement...and not finding anything useful in the Microsoft IE7 .adm, here is what I will propose to the PM.

I left in place the GPO for our intranet homepage and upgraded several users in a test group to IE7 via SMS push to see what the GPO would do.

Testing showed the one enforced homepage after IE7 was installed. This leaves the user the option of course to open a new tab and navigate to whatever homepage (www.google.com or what have you...) Once on that tab, each User can set that additional tab as their homepage.

This allows much more flexibility for each End User (and kinda makes them happy) to have an additional homepage to the intranet page so when they open IE at subsequent times (either during their same logon session or after logging out/in) the user will see two homepages open within the same IE window, thus taking advantage of tabs.

The interesting thing is that as long as you are adding homepages subsequent and not trying to change the initial tab homepage you are fine. The GPO doesnt care about homepage #2, #3, #4....just the primary.

Hope this helps. I am presenting this as a benefit to the user and our corp comm group (who was pushing for the static Intranet page to begin with)

Cheers,

I like it....it's nice and small. We will keep this one in our hip pocket. If my User's start to go freaky-outee about the defined multiple homepage tabs we can put this one together.

Nice Solution, thanks.

Just what I was looking for. If you're down in Dorset i'll buy you a pint.

Cheers

J

The logon script was a good idea, but fails to achieve the goal if the user closes IE during the day and does not log off. Still, it got me thinking of how else this could be accomplished. Here is what I came up with. Works great.

1. Create a text file
2. Paste the following code into it

<%@ LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" %>
<% response.buffer=true %>

redirect page
<%
Const navOpenInBackgroundTab = &H1000
Set oIE = Getobject("","internetexplorer.application")
oIE.Navigate2 "http://www.msn.com"
oIE.Navigate2 "http://companyweb", navOpenInBackgroundTab
oIE.Visible = true
%>

Close Window

3. Save the file and name it something like homepages.asp

4. Place the homepages.asp file in the C:\InetPub\WWWROOT directory of a server running IIS.

5. Configure the IE homepage in a GPO to point to http://servername/homepages.asp.

When IE launches it will open the designated web pages and close the initial IE window that hosted homepages.asp.

In the event that the user manually navigates to homepages.asp and had other IE Tabs open, then just the tab that launched homepages.asp will close and a new instance of IE will be running with the two homepages.