Windows 8 Quickie tip: Pinning items to Start screen automagically.

September 19, 2012

As presented to me by someone who is interested in deploying Win8 to the masses, There is a unique issue: You can’t exactly Pin items to the Start screen via AD or Group Policy… that we know of.

Turns out that you can’t on Windows 7 either, and so a script was whipped up by the wonderful Deployment team and slapped on their blog.

3 years later, it’s almost exactly what we need, but there’s one problem with their scrips.

In the script PinItem.wsf there’s a line that says “Pin to Start Menu”

Well… that’s all fine and dandy for Windows 7, but it’s no longer the start MENU, but just Start.

Delete the word Menu from there, save, and run. You’ll be pinning automagically from now on.

Here’s the blog post with all the infos from MSDN, Hope it helps.



EDIT: Now that I’m no longer rushing to type the blog post before class and now have 50(ish) minutes to expand on this further, I think I’ll take a stab at making the above make more sense.

Here’s a picture of the line that’s been changed.



Here’s a zip with the edited files and some of my testing crap in it too.

Hope that helps you all out.

–me

Let me know if you’ve got any questions.