For many users, the centered taskbar in Windows 11 is unfamiliar. To make the transition a bit easier for users, we’ll take a look at whether there’s a way to align the taskbar to the left like in Windows 10.

In the settings there is the possibility to change the taskbar alignment. However, we do not want to do this manually on all the clients, we are looking for a solution to set this setting centrally via Intune. Because Windows 11 is in the dev and beta channel there are no configuration policies for the new features available in Intune yet. So we have to find another way.

• First we want to find out what happens in the registry when we set the setting. For this we use the tool RegDiff and create a snapshot of the current registry state.

• Afterwards we change the Taskbar alignment to Left in the settings under Personalization -> Taskbar and take a 2nd snapshot of the registry.

• When this is done we click on Report to view the changes in the registry between the 1st and 2nd snapshot.

• In the file we can see the key that was changed from the setting. The value was changed from 1 to 0.

• If we look at the registry we can find more vaules to change the settings of the taskbar.

• I have created a detection powershell scripts that check if the windows version is Windows 11 and a remediation script that sets the registry value. I have uploaded this scripts to my repository.

• Now we just need to deploy the scripts via Intune. To do this, we open the MEM portal and navigate to Reports -> Endpoint analytics -> Proactive remediations
• Click Create script package

• Enter a name
• Click Next
• Upload the detection and the remediation script and select Yes for “Run this script using the logged on credentials“
• Click Next

• Click Next
• Assigne the Script to a group and click … and Edit
• Change the Schedule to Once (You can also select a other schedlue like hourly or daily) and click apply
• Click Next

• Click Create

So now all new deployments of Windows 11 machines will have the taskbar aligned to the left like you are familiar with Windows 10. I hope this is a little help for the switch to Windows 11. Probably there will be a proper configuration policy before the official release of Windows 11.

Stay healthy, Cheers
Jannik