You have created a shared start menu for your Hosted Shared Desktops, but you notice that the start menu groups and tile locations are not being applied for your users. So you Logon as an admin and pin your apps to the tile menu again and create start menu groups. You make sure that the Start menu folder redirection is configured to Move the contents of your Start Menu to the shared start menu location. You wish to use the Start Menu layout setting in Group Policy so that your Start menu tile format can be exported to XML and loaded for all users. You notice that the GPO setting isn't available because you are using 2008 AD servers. So what can be done? Follow this procedure to test a solution:
Download: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=43413
Make sure that you have already created the redirected Start Menu on a file share that has Access Based Enumeration enabled. Make sure that you have pinned all of your apps to the start menu and created any start menu groups
1 ) Go to DC.
2) Copy Startmenu.adml & admx files into same folder location and rename the copies to startmenubackup
3) Run the installer for the Win 8 2012 GPOs on the DDC with the GPMC console installed
4) C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Group Policy\Windows Server 2012\PolicyDefinitions
Copy Startmenu.adml & Startmenu.admx from Desktop Delivery Controller "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Group Policy\Windows Server 2012\PolicyDefinitions" to Domain Controller Policy Central Store
5) Overwrite existing files.
6) Go to your Start Layout Policy and check that "Start" or "Start Layout" GPO setting is available in Users\Admin Templates\Start Menu & Task Bar
7) Export your Start Layout using:
8) export-startlayout –path “\\YourStartMenuShareLocation\StartLayout.xml” -as xml
9) Edit the "Start" Layout GPO setting to point to the path that your XML file is located in (as above)
May have to copy Start Menu.adml and ADMx files into the c:\windows\policydefinitions of your Server 2012 controller and edit the GPO settings on there if you have no 2012 DCs.
10) Apply the policy and test. You should see the apps that your user has access to and the start menu layout should include the Start Menu groups you created