Group Policy Preference Sticky Map Drives

One of the great feature of Group policy is addition of Group Policy Preferences. GPP provides Group Policy administrators to configure various settings which weren't possible using Group Policy Objects. The only difference is the way the preferences are enforced and tattooed into Windows Registry.

Scenario:
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**An Organization has created Group policy preference to configure the Map drives for 1000 users. Organization is using Windows Server 2008 R2 as Domain Controller with Forest and Domain Functional level as Windows server 2008 R2 and has Windows 7 Standard Edition as their clients. Group Policy Administrator created GPO based on the Drive letter and Security groups. Post user logon , they are able to see their desired drive mappings successfully.

After few months, Organization has taken a decision to migrate the file server along with the Security Group Memberships, and requested Group Policy Management team to configure the Group policies to reflect the new File server drive mappings. During this phase, Group Policy Administrator deleted Group Policy which was referencing to old file server, and configured new Group Policy with new File server path and with different drive letter.

Issue:
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**When users logged on next day , they were able to see both Old and New file server paths.

Reason:

The above behavior is expected, unlike Group Policies which creates a copy and make the changes, Group policy preference directly make changes to the registry , which results in the above condition. Deleting the GPO would not delete the settings enforced by GPP.
 

**Solution: **
In the above scenario , create a GPP with "Delete" operation for Map drive , add necessary Security groups, and upon next logon, users will only see the desired Drive Maps.