Folder Redirection

[JamesDonkin]

Good afternoon lads and lasses,

 

I'm in the middle of setting up a new domain over three sites as we've recently become a multi academies trust with disjointed networks. I've used folder redirection in the past with 'documents' and 'desktop' - the usually biggies. On the new network I'd like to redirect the lot (that are redirectable) but it seems I have to do them one at a time and the result would be a folder for each redirectable, containing a folder each for all the users. It seems a bit messy. I'd like to have instead a folder for each user with all of their redirected folders in them. Seems to make a bit more sense. Has anyone done this? Am I just being pedantic?

 

Cheers for any help.

[Michael]

If you have three separate domains, then you'll need three separate Folder Redirections. Even with trusts in place, I'd still recommend three. Performing Folder Redirection over a WAN is asking for trouble and could create a lot of problems.

 

I've never quite understood why with some academy trusts that they have one big domain in a single forest. Sure, the schools are part of the same trust, but day to day, does school A have anything to do with school B? Surely you'd still need three Folder Redirection policies in place, as inevitably school A will have/use different software to school B?

 

It's a bit different when company A buys company B, as they would typically have a lot of involvement with each other. I can see more logic/benefit in this scenario.

[JamesDonkin]

Sorry mate, I'll fill in a bit more detail. We currently have three separate domains. We are three special needs schools who work very closely with each other, staff move about, so do students. We've bought new DCs (one at each site) and all storage is on a 16TB SAN at each location. The folders in these SANs are part of a distributed file system that replicates to all sites. Good for backup (off site) and availability at each location. Deleted files can be retrieved with VSS on a 4TB external drive at each location. The WAN links are 100MB and are part of the council's city wide private network (that we still buy into). So in our case, a single domain is the best fit. Any ideas about the redirection question though? There are thirteen folders per user.

[Michael]

I think you're still inevitably going to need multiple Folder Redirection policies, but they could all be held in a DFS namespace.

 

Your GPOs would then look at the same share/namespace and it would allow you to have all Redirections in one physical place (but management from any site), at least in theory.

[JamesDonkin]

Yeah, sort of resigned myself to that. Cheers for the answer though!