During a recent project, we experienced some issues with notifications not working. Outlook was giving notifications. Still, the program isn’t Outlook, but Microsoft.Office.OUTLOOK.EXE.15. Looking at the Notifications & Actions settings, it shows “Microsoft Outlook” without an icon and is turned Off; turning it on isn’t possible. It switches back to Off.
As shown in the screenshot below:
After hours of troubleshooting, I concluded that everything seemed to work when I first signed without any policies and then signed with policies. That looked strange to me because I thought that a policy, when applied, would have changed the appropriate setting to the same as it would have been when I started with all the policies applied.
I had to find which policy and setting were causing this issue. After troubleshooting for hours and hours again, by signing in, signing out, removing the profile, and repeating, I finally discovered that the policy setting “Remove common program groups from the start menu” was causing this issue. User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar > Remove Common program groups from the Start Menu
Solution
As we managed the start menu using Citrix WEM to keep it as clean as possible, we needed a workaround to fix this. The solution was to use FSLogix Appmasking to hide all non-default icons. I used the article from James Kindon (thanks for the tips) to create a clean start menu. After making the changes, the users must sign in two or three times before everything works correctly. Below, you see how it is supposed to work.
As mentioned before, I used James Kindon’s tips to create the App Masking rules. Below, you will see a subset of all the hiding rules and which assignments to use.
This environment is based on Windows Server 2022. I didn’t test whether this issue applies to Server 2019 or Windows 10/11. If you have the same issue with another Operating System, please comment so other users know it applies to them.