Start Menu Archives

Intune Deploy Windows 11 Default Start Menu

August 17, 2024

With Windows 11, many visual elements have changed, and one of the most noticeable ones is the Start Menu. With a new star menu comes a new way to manage it. With Windows 10, you can control the start menu with an XML file. Now, with Windows 11, you can control it with a JSON file.

What’s extra interesting is that you still control the taskbar with an XML file. If you want to know how to deploy a default taskbar, my blog post, Intune Deploy Default Taskbar, covers how to do that.

There are a few pitfalls when you control the Windows 11 Start Menu. The first one is that users will no longer be able to pin anything extra to the Start Menu.

The option to Pin to Start is no longer available

Another pitfall is that users can technically reorder the applications you pin in the start menu but the next time they log in, it is reset to the layout you defined.

In this post, I will show you step-by-step how to deploy a Windows 11 default Start Menu layout using Microsoft Intune.

Building the Start Layout

On a source system, pin the applications to the start menu in the order you want.

Export the Start Menu layout by running the following PowerShell command Export-StartLayout -path C:\temp\Win11-Start.json

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Intune Deploy Windows 10 Default Start Menu

April 20, 2024

I recently discovered that I caused an unintended side effect on Windows 10 when deploying a default taskbar for all users.

In my post Intune Deploy Default Taskbar I inadvertently introduced a bug to the Windows 10 Start Menu making it so users can’t customize anything.

The bug is that users can pin programs to the taskbar but they can’t pin anything to the Start Menu and they also can’t change anything in the Start Menu.

Can’t pin Microsoft Access to the Start Menu on Windows 10

The issue does not impact Windows 11 as the way the Windows 11 Start Menu layout uses JSON and the Windows 10 Start Menu layout uses XML, the same XML file that is used for the default taskbar.

I am happy to allow users to customize their Start Menu as much as they want but I do want a consistent user experience for all. Most users likely won’t change anything, but the ones that do want to customize their Start Menu would be blocked.

In this post, I will show you step-by-step how to fix the bug and how to deploy a partial custom Start Menu for Windows 10 using Microsoft Intune.

The Process

On a source system configure an application group in your start menu and pin the applications in the order you want.

The application group name will also be deployed. I named my application group Company Name for this example but you can make it whatever you want.

I don’t want the custom Start Menu application group to be very intrusive so I will use 1×1 icons for all the common Microsoft applications and I will use 2×2 icon for Company Portal as Company Portal is still new for a lot of people.

Source Windows 10 Start Menu application group

Export the Start Menu layout by running the following PowerShell command Export-StartLayout -UseDesktopApplicationID -path C:\temp\start-menu.xml

Open the Start Menu XML file as we will need to make changes to it.

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