When mapping Shares and Printers -- GPO or Logon Scripts?
I'd like to get everyone's opinion on whether it's better to use GPO or Logon Scripts when mapping shares and printers.
From my understanding, please let me know if I'm wrong, GPO seems like a cleaner solution.
- GPO allows you to manage Printers and Shares through security groups
- GPO has better troubleshooting tools.
- You can update users settings by running GPUPDATE /Force - no longer require logoff/login.
I perfer using group policy preferences for drive and printer mapping, but it really is just the preference of the person that has to manage it. Both scripts and GPO works fine and can generally give you the same results, but GPO preference I find easier to add criteria and troubleshoot.
It depends on the client OS.
I've run into a lot of issues using the native drive and printer map Group Policy functions on XP clients. They just don't seem to work quite right, and the only thing worse than getting a couple "my filez is gone, halp!!!!" tickets every day is getting 300 one morning because that GPO inexplicably decided to not show up for work one morning. (Yeah, really.) So I prefer logon or startup scripts for XP clients.
On the other hand, it seems to work flawlessly in Vista and 7, so I take advantage of the built in Group Policy settings for those clients.