Mand Profiles

Hi,

i want to get a feel for how other people are setting up and maintaining Students and Staff (Mand) Profiles.

1. How do people setup the profiles? Do you have to run each indiviual piece of software they are going to use?

2. What size are peoples profiles? (no jokes please hehe)

3. & How come that when i setup a profile for Students, the username i took the profile from has access to a piece of software but when i try to apply it to another student they get a permissons error..?

Thanks Steve

1. How do people setup the profiles? Do you have to run each indiviual piece of software they are going to use?

I set up an account, run all the software that needs to do any first run config and setup the desktop and start menu.

2. What size are peoples profiles? (no jokes please hehe)

Ours are just over a MB in size for pupils, staff have roaming profiles.

3. & How come that when i setup a profile for Students, the username i took the profile from has access to a piece of software but when i try to apply it to another student they get a permissons error..?

How are you copying the profile? The way I do it is to set up a share on the server, log in to the machine that I set up the profile on (as administrator), go to the System dialogue (right click my computer -> properties one I mean). On the advanced tab, click Settings under 'User Profiles', select the relevant profile and click copy to, choosing the share path. Then change the usual .dat file to a .man file and there we go.

I would also suggest you have a look at the Profiles page on the wiki.

It is made up of the collective comments from previous threads about profiles, etc.

We use Roaming profiles for students and I have always wondered if there is a better way of doing things.

Are mandatory profiles any better? Upsides/Downsides?

The wiki is indeed a good summary of the collective wisdom.

I'm adding my two penny's worth here as it is likely to receive more immediate peer reveiw...

I much prefer roaming profiles - it is the way application programmers expect windows to behave. I follow the advice contained in the wiki. With a couple of variances:

Desktops - I set these to not roam - they are local to the machine and everyone is told (and reminded regularly) that work on the desktop is not safe. - Desktop and App Data stored on a server cause problems if the conntection to the server might be lost (wireless network issue)

Cookies - Set not to roam - they may be small but if there are 10,000+ they takes a hell of a long time to copy back and forth.

Recent - see cookies.

Start Menu - left as roaming, and we use group policy+msi deployments to control what the students see.

Server side the profiles share has MS FSRM set to prevent storing of EXEs and a limit on folder sizes to 40Mb (warning only) Thus we get notified automatically if users are about to have a problem.

First sign of trouble we rename the server copy of the profile and ensure that the user logs on to a clean machine. We need to do this two or three times a week in a 1500 user network.

And this answer gets 0/10 for not ATQ!

Thanks for your responses...

Surfing the net there are lots of discussions on Mandatory Profiles and i can never find a true answer on the subject...

When you log on with a local user and you setup the user profile...

What sort of things do you change?

We are Primary and use a single Mandatory profile for all pupils.

I setup:

Word - Picture Toolbar, Default Font, Show boundaries , remove "autmatically create canvas when creating autoshapes", Change default page boundaries to Top 2.5cm, Sides 2.5cm, Bottom 1cm

Excel - Only 1 sheet in New Workbook (not the default 3)

Internet Explorer - have a good trek around websites like BBC schools using Flash, etc; Set Google Safe Search to its Maximum; Cleanup cookies, temporary files, etc

Desktop - tidy it up (don't have all the icons in columns down one side)

Start RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader & QuickTime to make sure any Accept licence agreement stuff has been accepted.