Jeff Wouters's Blog

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.

• Fill in the name for the Library.

• 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.

• 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