Windows Server 2012 Start Screen customising

Question

Hi all,

So I'm trying to customise the tiles on eight of my Windows 2012 servers.

We currently have a custom Start Screen xml file which we apply to all of them using Group Policy.

There are two things:

We need to add a few IE shortcuts to it, I have the following:

<group>
<tile AppID="URL" size="square150x150" FencePost="0"/>
<tile AppID="URL" size="square150x150" FencePost="0"/>
</group>

It's adding a tile for the first web link but not for the second and I can't figure out why.

The second thing is I've just installed Office 2013 on the test server and I want to add shortcuts to Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel but for some reason it's not displaying those either.

<group>
<tile AppID="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\WINWORD.EXE"" size="square150x150" FencePost="0"/>
<tile AppID="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\OUTLOOK.EXE" size="square150x150" FencePost="0"/>
<tile AppID="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\EXCEL.EXE" size="square150x150" FencePost="0"/>
<tile AppID="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\POWERPNT.EXE" size="square150x150" FencePost="0"/>
</group>

This is the first time I've needed to modify this so I'm probably doing something wrong with them, I just don't know what.

Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Hi,
As far as I know, Windows 10 has a small known issue when the assigned Internet Explorer shortcut doesn’t appear after applying the XML layout file via GPO. To solve the problem, you need to edit the XML file and change the line for the IE shortcut as follows:
<start:DesktopApplicationTile Size="2x2" Column="2" Row="2" DesktopApplicationLinkPath="%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Internet Explorer.lnk" />
And then through the GPO you need to copy the shortcut file “Internet Explorer.lnk” to the %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs.
https://ccmexec.com/2015/09/customizing-the-windows-10-start-menu-and-add-ie-shortcut-during-osd/
For the office apps, I consider that you could use <start:DesktopApplicationTile DesktopApplicationID=....
Check the xml file in the link below.
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2102075-how-do-we-auto-pin-all-office-apps-to-start-menu-and-task-bar-win10
Also please check the sample LayoutModification.xml in this official website. I hope it will be helpful.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/start-layout-xml-desktop
Please remember to accept the answer if they help.
Best Regards,
Carl