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 values to change the settings of the taskbar.
- I have created a detection PowerShell script that checks if the Windows version is Windows 11 and a remediation script that sets the registry value. I have uploaded these scripts to my repository.
- Now we just need to deploy the scripts via Intune. To do this, we open the Intune admin center 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
- Assign the script to a group and click … and Edit
- Change the Schedule to Once (You can also select another schedule 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 from Windows 10. I hope this is a little help for the switch to Windows 11.
Stay healthy, Cheers
Jannik
Are your scripts available to download for this?
The Intune.Training team has a video explaining their script for registry mods via Powershell. That should help you out.
As a rule of thumb, don’t run any one’s script without carefully looking it over and verifying that it doesn’t do anything it isn’t supposed to.
Getting an error in Intune stating that the scripts need to be between 1 and 200000 bytes.
Could it be that you uploaded an empty script?
I uploaded the scripts to my test device which is windows 11 but taskbar does not move to left
Did you run the script in the use ccontext?