Laptops at school and home (GPO folder redirection)

[dsk]

Hello all!

Ive done a bit of searching, so hopefully i havent missed a useful thread.

Our situation is that we have staff netbooks/laptops that they need to use in school. They want to use them at home, but our problem lies in that we have redirected desktops, not only a default one for all users, but some for departments too. We also have the start menu redirected.

When they get home, as the redirects point to a network share, they end up with a blank desktop and no programs in the start menu.

Sadly, teachers are simple folk and it scares them greatly to go look for the apps they want to use in Programs folder on the C drive.

We have Firefox installed so they can use that at home for the internet (proxy settings locked out in IE).

Does anyone have a similar setup or any ideas for a solution. I was thinking about making a local folder on the netbooks and having the redirect point to that, but it starts getting messy with our department specific ones and then the when we need to make updates etc.

Ta in advance!

[jamin100]

Setup a local user on the laptop and create the shortuts for software installed locally on the machine.

All the staff will need to do is remember a new username and pass (ours are generic accross all their laptops) and drop down the domain box to the local computer at the login window.

[dsk]

We did think about that but in the end do not want to go down that route again for the following:

Staff would get confused with passwords
Staff would use one or the other and not know where to save work
Staff would use the local all the time, laptop would die, work lost
Staff generally found the local user a bit complicated.

I know, it sounds really bad, but i guess part of our job is to make it easier for them and sadly local wasnt

[ZeroHour]

You could enable and set offline syncronisation for the shares that host the redirected paths and the laptops themselves?

[jamin100]

We did think about that but in the end do not want to go down that route again for the following:

Staff would get confused with passwords
Staff would use one or the other and not know where to save work
Staff would use the local all the time, laptop would die, work lost
Staff generally found the local user a bit complicated.

I know, it sounds really bad, but i guess part of our job is to make it easier for them and sadly local wasnt

It gives the staff a bit of responsibility to use the equiptment properly though. Makes them responsible for their data . . .

We've not had a problem with it here...

Another way is to dual boot the machine with 2 installations of XP. One called work and the other called home. Create a seperate data partition which can be seen from both installations and let them save their work into that.

you'll probable need two XP license per machine

[elsiegee40]

You could enable and set offline syncronisation for the shares that host the redirected paths and the laptops themselves?

That's what we do.

Only with 'My Documents' though... Desktop is not redirected here and Shared drives are not accessable when off our network.

[dsk]

Offline synchronisation sounds like it might what im after.

How would i go about it?

At the moment the the start menu and dekstop are redirected to a share on our domain controller. Is it something id do on the machine or via the GPO or a combination of the both?

[ZeroHour]

I assume the client is XP?
What OS is on the server?

[dsk]

Yes sorry!

Clients are running XP SP3, Server is 2008.

jamin100 id love to give the staff soem responsibility, but we have such a hard time pushing things like our VLE and SIMS Learning Gateway, which is for their benefit, there's only so much we can do Thank you for your suggestions though