profile type advice needed

[jjohnsoncantell]

Greetings,

Our setup currently uses forced mandatory profiles, this is great for applying the same settings throughout the users and them not being able to change anything. This does however cause problems when using programs that need personalising such as outlook and a lot of our media software. We also chose them to keep network load at a minimum while using laptops and keep the logon times respectable.

One example is some music software we use which would normally ask the user to set up the hardware and project storage area during start up. With a normal profile you could change this yourself and choose the hardware relative to the machine. Because they are all identical i can set through the mandatory profile for them which generally works, however if anything about the machine changes, especially if its reimaged and the hardware is assigned a different id this does not work..

I need a more flexible aproach that will allow users to personalise programs/environments the way they want to while at the same time keeping the profiles as small as possible.

I would appreciate any advice you all may be able to give as to whether i should change the type of profiles we use or if there are ways around the issue.

Thanks
James

[3s-gtech]

Redirected AppData for users, with any AppData for the software you want to customise kept out of the mandatory profile should work - I can't think of specific software here where I need to customise like this for each student as we don't install Outlook, but that way would make most sense to me!

[jjohnsoncantell]

thanks for your reply..

so can i still get away with using mandatory but in addition to redirected profile? wont windows ignore the mandatory appa data in that case??