After spending ages trying to find a scriptable way to control what's shown on the default Windows 8 Start Menu tiles, I happened to come across a post on customising the menu with Powershell by Ben Hunter at the Deployment Guys.
The Metro style of menu utilises the new standard of "AppX" shortcut encapsulation. All staff have the ability to add their own AppX packages in a single user context but more importntly, administrators will be interested in AppX packages that are provisioned for all staff. As highlighted by Ben, these two types of packages can be removed en masse with the powsershell commands below:
Get-AppXProvisionedPackage -online | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage –online
Get-AppXPackage | Remove-AppxPackage
Or default Microsoft packages may be individually removed. Note that the packages are architecture specific.
eg.
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage –package Microsoft.Bing_1.2.0.137_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.BingFinance_1.2.0.135_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.BingMaps_1.2.0.136_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.BingNews_1.2.0.135_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.BingSports_1.2.0.135_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.BingTravel_1.2.0.145_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.BingWeather_1.2.0.135_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.Camera_6.2.8514.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package microsoft.microsoftskydrive_16.4.4204.712_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.Reader_6.2.8516.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_16.4.4206.722_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package microsoft.windowsphotos_16.4.4204.712_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.XboxLIVEGames_1.0.927.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.ZuneMusic_1.0.927.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.ZuneVideo_1.0.927.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.Media.PlayReadyClient_2.3.1662.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -package Microsoft.Media.PlayReadyClient_2.3.1662.0_x86__8wekyb3d8bbwe -online
This original post has been updated for the initial release of Windows 8.1 - these datails may be found here.
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