Configure Manged Favorites For Microsoft Edge Chromium

If your organization has many internal web services or frequently used websites that your users need quick and easy access to, the managed favorites feature could be a useful way to make these websites easily available to end-users. By setting up managed favorites, you can ensure that your users have quick and convenient access to the websites they need, improving their productivity and efficiency.

Example of how you could design your company favorites using this Group Policy.

Installing the ADMX for Edge Chromium.

Let’s start by visiting the “Edge For Business” website and download the latest version of the ADMX files.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/business/download

Once you click the “GET POLICY FILES” you will start downloading the cab file containing the ADMX files for your Active Directory.
“MicrosoftEdgePolicyTemplates.cab”

Open the cab file and extract the “MicrosoftEdgePolicyTemplates.zip” here you will find the required files for the installation.
We need to extract 4 files from the zip.

The first two files are located in the root of the ADMX folder.
C:\MicrosoftEdgePolicyTemplates\windows\admx
FILE 1: msedge.admx
FILE 2: msedgeupdate.admx

The second two files are located under ADMX and then your desired language folder. (For my setup, I will use the “en-US” files)
C:\MicrosoftEdgePolicyTemplates\windows\admx\en-US
FILE 3: msedge.adml
FILE 4:msedgeupdate.adml

Copy the first two files to the following location on your domain controller.
\\localhost\SYSVOL\YOURDOMAIN.local\Policies\PolicyDefinitions

Copy the second two files to the following location on your domain controller.
\\localhost\SYSVOL\YOURDOMAIN.local\Policies\PolicyDefinitions\en-US

The required policy definitions are now installed and ready to use for your domain.

Configure Your Own Json String.

Microsoft has a great example of how to format your JSON string to use for the managed favorites.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-policies#managedfavorites

It’s important to validate your string to make sure you won’t have any errors when rolling out the changes for your users and minify your JSON string to be as compact as possible.

This website can help you accomplish both tasks with ease.
https://jsonformatter.org/

Configure The Manged Favorites Policy

Create a new group policy to use for the manged favorites in your organisation, make sure to only target the users you want this policy to apply for.

Open your newly created GPO and navigate to the following policy.
User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Edge\Configure Favorites

Make sure to enable the policy and enter your JSON string into the “Configure favorites” field.

We have now accomplished the following.
– Downloaded the ADMX files for your domain controller
– Installed the required ADMX files on your domain controller.
– Created a GPO to use for the policy and enabled the “Manged favorites”
– Created a JSON string to use for the managed favorites.

If you have any questions / feedback or would like to correct me on any of the stuff above, please use the comment section or contact me directly using the blue button in the bottom right corner.

2 thoughts on “Configure Manged Favorites For Microsoft Edge Chromium”

  1. Hey,

    i have created few policies with different bookmarks for different groups of people (department). those are driven by AD group holding people in each department, so finance dep. will receive GPO only for finance group members etc.

    However, there are few people which needs to be a part of two groups – that means 2 different GPO’s.
    Both GPO’s contains different “root folder” name and the children ones below.

    Yet when im pushing GPO’s to the users, it looks like one GPO is overwritting the second one, in result they receive only 1 bundle of bookmarks instead of 2. Is there any way to have 2 GPO’s run in parallel for this users ?

    Reply
  2. How do I get a bookmark directly on the favorites bar (and not under any folder or under “Managed Favorites”)????

    Reply

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