In our corporate network, we have half a dozen or so applications that we programmed in house.  They are not "installed" on the local machine in the traditional manner.  Instead, each workstation just has desktop & start menu shortcuts that point to the executables which reside on a central server.  For example: \\SERVER1\Applications\ControlCenter.exe would start up the "Control Center" shared application that resides on "SERVER1" in the "Applications" share

Normally, to "pin" a shortcut to any given application in Windows 7, you can just start up the application you wish to pin, right click it and choose "Pin this program to taskbar" (As illustrated below)

In Windows 7 however, there is no option to "pin this program to the taskbar" on a network application's taskbar icon

This is an issue for businesses like ours that may range from minor annoyance to deal breaker when it comes to deciding to make the Win7 upgrade.  I have recently discovered a work around.  I was never able to find this documented anywhere else so I'm writing it up myself.

The short version is that you'll pin a different, locally hosted application to taskbar, then modify the shortcut properties on the pinned icon to point to your network based app instead.  Pretty simple now that I'm thinking about it.  Perhaps this is why I never found this tip anywhere else :)

Here's the step by step with screen shots:

In this case, my app that lives on the network share is called "Control Center" from the following path: \\SERVER1\Applications\ControlCenter.exe (this also applies to mapped drive letters).  If you don't know the network path to your application, you should probably let your IT person handle this operation.

I am going to use Paint as my dummy app.  So start up paint, then right click the icon on the taskbar and pin it to the taskbar.

Now close paint and shift right click the icon that is now pinned and select properties from the menu that comes up:

In the Paint Properties dialog box that comes up, clear out the current target and replace with the complete path to your network app.  If needed, fill out the "start in" field and clear out the "comment" field

(download)

Click here to download:

Pin_a_Shortcut_to_a_rogram_or_.zip (428 KB)

To set the correct icon, click the "change icon..." button and browse to your application's exe file.

Lastly, click over to the "General" tab and change the name from Paint to a more appropriate name.  Click OK and enjoy!