We will be rolling out a company intranet shortly. We want to drive traffic to it by forcing everyone's IE home page to it. At present we want to test our group policy on just a small group of computers. We have a pair of Win 2k8 r2 servers functioning as our domain controllers. The computers we are testing on are Windows 8.1, fully patched, with IE 11. Also testing it on Win7 with IE 11.
I created a group policy object with this setting:
user configuration-->policies-->administrative templates-->windows components-->internet explorer
I set the variable "disable changing home page settings" to Enabled and entered the URL of my intranet.
I also set
user configuration-->preference-->control panel settings-->internet settings
with new settings for IE 5, 6, 7, and 8 for the home page.
I have the computers I would like to test on in an OU and I linked the GPO I created to that OU.
Then I tried a gpupdate /force on one of the computers in that OU. It told me group policy had updated successfully. After a reboot though IE's home page was still the default, rather than our Intranet.
So next I went into the Scope tab in GPMC and added a group to the security filtering for the GPO in question. This group contains the username I'm using to log into my test computers. Did another gpupdate /force and rebooted on my client computer again...still my IE home page hasn't been changed.
What am I missing here? Thanks, spiceheads.