Have you hit this annoyance? Would you please vote to get it fixed? And in the meantime, I have a tip to help you.

When one installs ColdFusion on a Windows machine, CF implements itself in the Windows Start menu under Programs>Adobe>ColdFusion–but it only does that for the user logged in and running the installer.

Any later users who login to the machine with some other account (such as other administrators, or someone who owns a hosted machine where the host installed ColdFusion) will find that they CANNOT see that CF Start menu. And so they can’t easily get to the CF Admin, or the the web server config tool, etc. unless they know where those things are located (via url or in the file system). And many folks don’t use these things enough to “just know” where they are.

This could easily be solved if Adobe would modify the ColdFusion installer, to offer an option (like many apps do) asking whether to implement the Start menu options for only the current user OR for all users on the machine.

And I’ve filed a feature request asking for just that. Please add your vote or comment:

https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/CF-4204095

Of course, we are only talking about people seeing these who CAN LOGIN to the server as some other user. There is no negative impact on security with respect to those accessing the server only through the web server.

What you may be able to do in the meantime

Until this can be fixed, I’ll share a little tip: you may be able to find and copy the Windows Start menu folder for the Programs>Adobe>ColdFusion menu, copying it from the folder of the user who DID install CF, into your own user folder.

For instance, if the user “Admin” had installed CF, you may find that their ColdFusion menu is stored here:

C:Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Adobe\ColdFusion 2018

(If you find you “can’t see” that path, see below for another tip on perhaps “getting access” to that.)

If you did find it there, you could copy that Adobe folder and paste it into your own equivalent start>programs menu folder:

C:\Users\[youraccount]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

(And if you do already have an Adobe folder there, Windows will ask if you want to merge the contents into that folder, which you would want to do.)

Or even better, you could copy that Adobe folder into the start>programs menu folder for “ALL users” on the machine:

C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

(Note that it differs from the others as it’s not in an AppData folder.)

Either way, if you are able to make that copy of that Adobe folder into your own or that of all users, you should then see the Start menu reflect the change immediately.

That said, you may not have the authority to access the user folder for that other user (Admin, above), especially if you are not yourself in the Admin group or have other elevated privileges on the server.

Then again, even if you are an the admin group yourself, you may STILL find that if you just try to copy/paste that entire path into Windows Explorer/File Explorer, it may report that you cannot access the folder. Here’s a trick about that: try visiting the folders (in Windows Explorer) by drilling down into them from the leftmost folder first, then work your way “to the right”.

So go to C:Users first, then that admin user, then their appdata folder, then roaming, and so on. In doing it that way, Windows may prompt you at some point to allow it to elevate your privileges (as an Admin) to see the selected folder. And then you can drill all the way down to the Programs>Adobe folder.

Similarly, you may not SEE that “All Users” account discussed above in your view of the C:Users folder, but try typing it in and then proceed as above.

But all this hassle is just another reason why it would just be better if Adobe would solve this for us in the installer.