i have an old school internet explorer maintenance GPO setting up a couple of folders of IE favorites, containing a total of about 120 URLs accumulated over several years. we are in the process of both A. redirecting Favorites and B. changing the IEM over to group policy preferences (since IEM goes away with IE10). we still allow our users to create their own IE favorites in addition to the ones in our two folders.
i really do not want to create all 120 of these shortcuts by hand. it also seems kind of inefficient to have the same 120 shortcuts stored in 2000+ separate places (of course shortcuts aren't big, but still) rather than having them all in a single location where all users can read them. to that end, i could put them all into a network folder where everyone only has read permissions, and redirect favorites to that folder, but then the users lose their own favorites. in my head what i really need is to "redirect" two or three subfolders of Favorites to a different location than Favorites.
so my favorites get redirected to \\server\share\john.curtiss\favorites
but i need
\\server\share\john.curtiss\favorites\folder1 and
\\server\share\every.other.user\favorites\folder1
to point to \\server\readonlyshare\folder1.
i tried creating a File System shortcut object %favoritesdir%\folder1 pointing at\\server\readonlyshare\folder1, but when i click on that folder shortcut in IE, it opens up a separate windows explorer window rather than expanding within IE to display the URL shortcuts it contains.
clear as mud? thoughts on how to accomplish what i'm trying to do?