Set IE homepage per SITE, not per user. HOW?

[Dave Niemeyer]

(I posted this in another thread and lost it's location so this is a repost,
sorry.)



I work at a school district with 5 school sites. I have 3 OU's containing
users only (Students, Staff, and Special Staff). Many of the users are
mobile, going to different sites.



I've successfully set all the other policies for all the user OU's but I
want to GEOGRAPHICALLY set the home page for the MACHINES. In other words,
no matter WHO logs on to a machine at SMITH school, I want the homepage for
IE to be that school's home page. Then at JONES school I want all their
MACHINES' homepage set to Jones' school home page. The users are mobile but
I want the machines to be constant as far as IE's homepage is concerned, per
site. Is there a way to do that?



I was thinking of making OU's that contain all the COMPUTERS in each
geographical site and then manage IE that way but I didn't know what would
happen or if I had to do something called LOOPBACK. I haven't set homepages
for the users' OU yet because of the mobility as I mentioned. If I set a
GPO for the MACHINES' OU will there be a way to set homepage? The answers
I've seen in other posts suggests that IE homepage policy is only in USER'S
settings in the template so I'm confused as to how to do this.



Thanks for the help.



Dave Niemeyer

 

[Wayne Tilton]

(I posted this in another thread and lost it's location so this is a
repost, sorry.)



I work at a school district with 5 school sites. I have 3 OU's
containing users only (Students, Staff, and Special Staff). Many of
the users are mobile, going to different sites.



I've successfully set all the other policies for all the user OU's
but I
want to GEOGRAPHICALLY set the home page for the MACHINES. In other
words, no matter WHO logs on to a machine at SMITH school, I want the
homepage for IE to be that school's home page. Then at JONES school I
want all their MACHINES' homepage set to Jones' school home page. The
users are mobile but I want the machines to be constant as far as IE's
homepage is concerned, per site. Is there a way to do that?



I was thinking of making OU's that contain all the COMPUTERS in each
geographical site and then manage IE that way but I didn't know what
would happen or if I had to do something called LOOPBACK. I haven't
set homepages for the users' OU yet because of the mobility as I
mentioned. If I set a GPO for the MACHINES' OU will there be a way to
set homepage? The answers I've seen in other posts suggests that IE
homepage policy is only in USER'S settings in the template so I'm
confused as to how to do this.



Thanks for the help.



Dave Niemeyer

Dave,

The answer to your question is in the question. Create a SITE level GPO
with the customized IE settings using AD Sites and Services. GPO's are
applied in LSDO (Local, Site, Domain, OU) order, so as long as you don't
override that setting with a domain or OU level GPO, computers will get
the policy based on the IP address, not the user or computer objects
location in the directory. (This naturally assumes that you have the
sites set up in AD S&S.)

Wayne