Howto create and deploy custom libraries in Windows 7

Last week I’ve posted (in Dutch!) on the IT Professional Community Blog from Microsoft about creating custom libraries in Windows 7.
In that post I wrote about the possibilities for creating custom libraries in Windows 7, but this was not a “manual”.
After some requests, I started writing this post… there seems to be a lot of IT Pro’s out there that want to accomplish this so I’ve made a little manual on howto create and deploy custom libraries in your environment.

Creating the custom library

  • Log on the Windows 7 VM with credentials which has access to the locations you wish to add to the libraries.
  • Open Windows Explorer.
  • In the right pane, right click on a white part of the screen.
  • Select New -> Library.

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  • Fill in the name for the Library.

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  • Right click on the library and select Properties.
  • Add the locations you desire to add to this library.
  • Select the location you desire to set as the default location to save data to and click on “Set save location” to configure this.
  • Select what you want to optimize this library for.
  • Press OK.

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  • Goto %appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries
  • Edit the file of your library with Notepad.

Under the line “<isLibraryPinned>true</isLibraryPinned>”, add the following line:
<iconReference>shell32.dll,96</iconReference>
Here you can specify a file with the icon you desire to represent this library.

Prepare the custom library for deployment

  • Goto %appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries
  • Copy the file from the library you have just created to a location accessible from the network.

Deploy the custom library

  • Edit a user Group Policy.
  • Goto User Configuration -> Policies -> Windows Settings -> Scripts (Logon/Logoff) -> Logon.
  • Add a logon script which copies the library file from the network share to %appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries

Script example:
copy
\\domain\netlogon\Library name*.* %appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries

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