Positives for staff home folders

I am rolling out windows 7 with 2008 R2 Servers at the moment and I want to change the way staff work. At the moment they have full access to the C:\ drive not good I know but its they way it was when I got here. Now I just want them to have access to their own home folder and the various network shares, and I see this upgrade as the perfect time.

This is going to go down like a lead balloon, so I would like to know if any of you have go through this process and what reasons did you give the staff to get them onside? I don't really want to have a war on my hands when they come back.

Reasons I was thinking of using are

1. They will have access to their files no mater what pc they log on to.
2. Their files are always backed up
3. ?????

You've pretty much got it:

• Laptops with folder redirection and syncronised folders gives them that local experience feeling.
• Their junk gets backed up
• Their junk spirited away in various places on the HD will not be searched for at the cost of hours and massive frustration in case of a reimage
• A laptop can be swapped out at a moments notice
• It will be just as fast accessing docs as it can use the local synced folder store
• Their junk is reliably virus scanned on the server

* junk = files

Key one is making sure its all backed up, so I say to a user if your PC goes pop you wont loose all your information save! They go oh really, thought its backed up off the pc!

another reason is the combo of redirected folders and offline files work a lot better in windows 7 than xp. That's assuming they have bad memories
of xp and offline folder synching at some point in their lives.

If this is upgrade time, it might be the time to * cough * ' discover' that, as you feared, in a network situation Sever 2008/Win 7/software of your choice expects all drives available to be network drives and the C: drive only to be available for system use.

In the interests of rolling them out for the start if next term, and to ensure that Teaching and Learning is not affected, you had no choice but to set them up without C: drive access.

I like that elsiegee40, thanks guys I think I just need to construct an email with all the facts that you have all supplied

Quote:

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Originally Posted by edie209

I like that elsiegee40, thanks guys I think I just need to construct an email with all the facts that you have all supplied

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Years of experience of bamboozling muggles with science ;)

This one is more justification to management than staff but, bring it up to management that this will translate into less time you have to dedicate to support desktops. When users have limited access it curtails their ability to bork the computer.

I hope you have 100% backing of your management behind you on this; I've seen directly what happens when you take local admin away from a user base. Get ready for the pitchforks and torches. :boom: