TechVentiX: Injecting Custom Files and Registry Settings with AppVentiX

Written by our engineers, TechVentiX is a blog series in which we’ll dive deeper into the technology of application distribution and management.

In modern enterprise environments, customizing application behavior on a per-department or per-user basis is a recurring challenge. Most organizations lack a robust mechanism to push custom files or registry settings to devices—especially as more environments shift to cloud-based management. Traditionally, Group Policy Objects (GPO) served this purpose well in on-premises Active Directory (AD) environments, but with the growing adoption of EntraID-joined devices, that option is no longer viable.

Cloud-native solutions like Microsoft Intune offer limited support for complex file or registry injection, and often lack the fine-grained control or flexibility needed. This becomes particularly evident when dealing with modern application formats such as App-V, MSIX, and “click-to-run” applications delivered from network shares or web-based sources.

This article explores how organizations can still achieve tailored deployments in the absence of traditional GPO-based tools, by focusing on alternative injection strategies compatible with modern application delivery models.

With AppVentiX you can seamlessly implement these strategies through its built-in support for custom file and registry injection during application provisioning, enabling flexible customization at scale.

Challenges in Modern Environments

Organizations using EntraID-joined devices typically manage endpoints with Intune or similar MDM solutions. These tools:

• Do not natively support injecting arbitrary files into user directories
• Offer only limited registry configuration capabilities
• Lack robust targeting and scripting capabilities compared to GPO

This limits IT’s ability to tailor applications unless they use third-party tooling or custom scripting. App-V and MSIX further isolate the application environment, which makes injecting into virtualized containers more complex.

Technical Approaches

1. File Injection (Outside the App Container)

Although App-V and MSIX restrict direct modification of the package internals, external paths such as %APPDATA%, %LOCALAPPDATA%, or %PROGRAMDATA% can still be targeted for configuration files.

Use scripting engines or deployment automation (e.g., PowerShell scripts triggered by scheduled tasks or login scripts) to copy files as needed. Intune Win32 apps can sometimes be leveraged as wrappers to distribute and execute these scripts.

2. Registry Injection

For apps that read from HKCU or HKLM, you can inject values using scripts. This works best when the application does not sandbox registry access (which is common with some MSIX-packaged apps).

Example PowerShell Snippet:

New-ItemProperty -Path “HKCU:\Software\ContosoApp” -Name “PreferredView” -Value “Compact” -PropertyType String

Avoid injecting settings post-launch unless the application re-reads its configuration dynamically.

3. Timing and Automation

Since GPO and traditional software transforms aren’t available in cloud-native setups, timing becomes critical:

• Use first-login scripts to apply settings before the user interacts with the app
• Trigger scheduled tasks for post-install customization
• Wrap file/registry modifications in Intune Win32 apps if needed

4. Targeting Based on Environment

To apply changes selectively, determine targeting logic through:

• Device naming conventions
• EntraID group membership
• Runtime environment variables or login context

Custom logic in your scripts can read and evaluate these attributes to determine whether and what customizations to apply.