We’ve discovered this feature to be available in this new 8.1 Enterprise Preview of Windows, the so called “Start Screen Control”. What can you do if your users always change the Windows 8.1 Start Screen, but you want to give the same layout and prevent them to change it?
A Group Policy Object should be a good idea. Actually if you take a look at the Computer Configuration node, you will see the setting that appears in the next picture:
Here we are: Start Screen Layout is here, so let’s check the settings:
The only thing that you need to do is to specify the path (could be a network one) and the name of the XML file that you need to create and represents the Start Screen layout that you want to be enforced to every computer in the company. So we need to create this XML file on our “reference” computer, just by using Powershell and the Export-StartLayout cmdlet:
If you take a look at the contents of this file, you can understand that contains all the settings that control how the tiles and apps will be placed on screen:
So Active Directory and GPOs are here and now there is an easy way to customize the look and feel of the Windows 8.1 Start Screen.
