Windows 7 Professional & Server 2003 AD

[acrobson]

Hi all,

I am starting to test Windows 7 professional within our Server 2003 AD enviroment. Has anyone gone down this route yet and what have people found.

So far, which ever domain profile I use to log on with, it creates another exact copy on the home drive, however add's .V2 on the end and then fails to pull the profile down, IE mapped drives, home drive, favorites etc etc. However the original home drive is intact and works fine within the Windows XP enviroment. It also sets the new home folder .V2 as access denied to anyone other than the user.

I'm starting to wonder if it;s time for us to go to 2008!

[acrobson]

Any ideas?

[kmount]

The .V2 is for Vista/7/2008R2 profile versions, not compatible with XP.

Are you using roaming profiles or so?

then fails to pull the profile down, IE mapped drives, home drive, favorites etc etc.

Is this scripted or part of a mandatory profile or what?

[acrobson]

The .V2 is for Vista/7/2008R2 profile versions, not compatible with XP.

Are you using roaming profiles or so?



Is this scripted or part of a mandatory profile or what?

Thanks, Yes, we do use roaming profiles, these are set up through the standard user properties within the AD Users and Computers applet within administrative tools.

Is there anyway of making Windows 7 download a profile which has previously been used on a Windows XP machine, or is it a case of creating a new profile which has never been used on XP before, or, is it time for Server 2008 R2?

[kmount]

From my (limited) experience you're not going to get an XP profile to play at all, I'd make a new one on W7 and go from there.

Mind you, I believe it will append the .V2 itself so in theory you shouldn't need to touch anything and everyone will have two profiles, one for XP, one for W7 but settings won't roam between.

There's a few good folks on here who are in the throws/have done this already, I'm sure they'll have some better answers.

[acrobson]

I can accept there being two profiles, as long term, we will be going over to Server 2008 R2, it would just be nice to either get the settings to roam, or at the ver least, get the settings migrated across as they are, such as cached credentials, printers, mapped drives and so on.

Any suggestions would be much apprechiated :-)

It's not affecting the core use of the domain as such, however, I dont like being beaten by machines!

Thanks, again.

[kmount]

How are you deploying the printers, drives etc?

[acrobson]

The printers ad drives are mainly just added as and when by staff, all users have their home drive mapped using roaming profiles and any additional drives added by the logon script and the printers set up on the machines locally, or via the print server.

[kmount]

Ah, I doubt very much if you'll get that to roam between environments fella, would suggest looking to move towards mapping drives at logon. How do you handle moving server/share locations if folks have manually mapped stuff? That would do my box in!

[acrobson]

Once the drives are mapped, they map at logon each time. Sorted. Under XP, once there done, their done and follow the users wherever they go on the LAN or if the machine needs to be re-imaged, it comes back like magic!

[kmount]

But if you move a share "SharedDocuments2 from Server1 to Server2 it breaks for everyone?

I understand the flexibility in letting people map their own drives etc but in my past experience people weren't technically able to understand this and perform it for themselves so it made sense for us at least to map them on logon allowing us to control what was where.

Horses for courses though.

That said, if they are able to map drives etc on XP, once they've done it on W7 it'll roam OK, just a pain as you say doing it again but I very much doubt you can avoid that.

[acrobson]

We only allow the staff to mapp their drives, at least the ones they have access too!

The rest get it done through logon script. We have soo many drives and soo many staff, of which different ones are only allowed access to certain shares etc, it's easier letting them map their own once we have created a share/folder ad allowed them access.

[kmount]

Horses for courses fella, I'm not knocking your set up, it obviously works for your network

[acrobson]

We have some random things set up here. Mostly from my Predecessor. But hey, if it works! Plus, it helps when most of the staff can be IT literate when they want to be!

[kmount]

Absolutely, a real boon I'm sure.

Do let us know how it progresses, if there's any ideas from those versed in the W7 deployment I'm sure they'll pipe up (most are probably at the pub on a Saturday night!).