A requirement for almost all organisations looking to manage their Windows 10 estate is to push out desktop shortcuts.
After enrolling your device into Workspace One UEM you can push a script out that will create your shortcut. Here’s an example of mine:
Open notepad and copy the following, edit your URL’s and the location of your .ico file.
@echo off
echo Set oWS = WScript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”) > CreateShortcut.vbs
echo sLinkFile = “%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\Desktop\WorkspaceOne.lnk” >> CreateShortcut.vbs
echo Set oLink = oWS.CreateShortcut(sLinkFile) >> CreateShortcut.vbs
echo oLink.TargetPath = “https://eucse.vmwareidentity.eu” >> CreateShortcut.vbs
echo oLink.IconLocation = “c:\EUCSE\WorkspaceOne\WS1.ico” >> CreateShortcut.vbs
echo oLink.Save >> CreateShortcut.vbs
cscript CreateShortcut.vbs
del CreateShortcut.vbs
This script will create a .vbs script that creates the shortcut.
Save the document as a .bat file.
Now we can upload the .bat file as a ‘Product’ into the Workspace One portal and push it out to our managed Windows 10 machines by following the below steps:
Click on Devices->Staging&Provisioning->Files/Actions
This is where we’re going to upload the script and the .ico file.
Click ‘Add Files/Actions’
Select Windows and choose Windows Desktop
Name the ‘Files/Actions’
Add your files, specifying the path you wish to download the files to.
No we need to set the manifest, this is the command that the Agent, on the device, will execute
Hit save.
Now we need to add this ‘Files/Actions’ into a product. The product will be assigned to the end devices and executed
Create a new product and select Windows again. Name the product and assign it to the relevant group
On the manifest tab, select the ‘File/Actions’ that will now be listed and save and activate the product.
Your end devices will now receive the specified files and execute them, all from the Workspace One UEM console.
Sales Engineer specialising in Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) and Identity Management.
Technical Expertise:
o Okta – Identity Management – Providing single sign on services to applications
o VMware Workspace ONE – Configuring and managing AirWatch components across all device types.
o Digital Transformation – Helping organisations implement and deploy a modern strategy for UEM
o Networking – VPN, DNS, DHCP
o Device Management – macOS, iOS, Android, Windows and Rugged Devices
o Cloud Solutions – Azure, Office 365, Identity Providers, VMware AirWatch
o Server – Windows Server, Active Directory, Exchange
amontague78
March 29, 2021This is a great guide. However, I ran into an issue where the link I was trying to create had a ‘-‘ in it which caused VBS to throw a invalid character error. I’ve resolved this by switching from a Batch\VBS to a Powershell script like bellow:
$objShell = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell
$lnk = $objShell.CreateShortcut(“$home\Desktop\My.lnk”)
$lnk.IconLocation=”C:\MyFolder\My.ico”
$lnk.TargetPath = “\\My-Server-01\My\My.exe”
$lnk.Save()
This also resolves issues with URLs with ‘-‘ characters which is common with Workspace ONE Access URLs that have been generated by VMware.