Profiles for Staff and Students

[simonstubbsets]

Morning All.

 

We have been using Mandatory profiles since XP - create the profile, make the changes, copy to the server, make .dat a .man, etc... with Windows 7, we have done the same, but using Windows Enabler to make the "Copy to" button active and the .v2 profile. I'm aware this is technically a not supported method. I was wondering how you guys are doing your profiles? Do you use mandatory profiles for all? Or do you use Roaming Profiles and re-directs? We are starting to look at redirecting desktops for staff - particularly SMT users. We currently support 30 schools at the moment - so we are looking at trying to maximise the performance of all workstations, laptops, netbooks, etc....

 

thanks.

[Chuckster]

Roaming profiles here as we wanted our users to have their own customisations.

 

AppData is redirected to users own area as well as the desktop.

 

User drive is mapped with H:

 

Therefore Appdata is H:\Application Data and desktop is H:\Desktop

[simonstubbsets]

Thanks Chuckster - so are you just allowing the user to create their own profile at logon - with the folders re-directed via GPO? seems a good idea. think for the kids, we were thinking of sticking with the Mandatory - we support Primary, Infant, Junior - so the ability to logoff and logon and get the correct icons back is an advantage.

[localzuk]

We created a profile by following the official 'build an image' method.

 

We only have a profile for pupils. A mandatory profile for them.

 

Staff now don't have one at all, as roaming profiles are a nightmare in terms of bad practice by users.

[Chuckster]

@simonstubbsets, yup, that's exactly what we're doing.

@localzuk, I've never had any problems with roaming profiles, ever, using both XP and 7.

[sted]

Roaming profiles here as we wanted our users to have their own customisations.

 

AppData is redirected to users own area as well as the desktop.

 

User drive is mapped with H:

 

Therefore Appdata is H:\Application Data and desktop is H:\Desktop

 

that but h=u and I don't redirect app datya as some programs don't like it (granted some software (im looking at you crapple backing up ipads to the profile ) stores silly amounts of rubbish there but when I find users with huge profiles I exclude directories from roaming or set up junction points so its not really there

[localzuk]

@simonstubbsets, yup, that's exactly what we're doing.

@localzuk, I've never had any problems with roaming profiles, ever, using both XP and 7.

 

We have never had fun with roaming profiles. Staff enjoy filling desktops with files, and then taking an hour to login. Random profile corruptions are a pain too, and we had about a 5% rate of this per year here in XP.

[sted]

We have never had fun with roaming profiles. Staff enjoy filling desktops with files, and then taking an hour to login. Random profile corruptions are a pain too, and we had about a 5% rate of this per year here in XP.

 

thaqts why you redirect as much as you can so the profile stays small but yes every now and then they corrupt but its not often and I tend to find its the same people

[witch]

We redirect everything. Generally don't have an issue with staff but I get about 5 corrupt profiles a week for the children - since we had netbooks. I just recreate them. I check the staff profiles every few weeks ever since I found one full of a game that had been downloaded. I exclude that sort of thing if I find it and all seems well

[simonstubbsets]

I've got a limited number of users in each school with a roaming profile with desktop and my docs re-directed - but they are for the Admin front office staff. We don't seem to get too many issues as they all seem to have their own PC and logon to that one machine. Have any of you used Mandatory profiles with Windows 8? How are you moving the profile onto the profile share on the server for users to login with?

[Boredguy]

We took one of the standard profiles that Windows created for our users at first logon, altered the permissions via regedit so that everyone had access to the content of the dat file instead of the user we original logged in as, then when we create a user we copy that over as the users NTUser.Dat (for staff) or NTUser.Man (for pupils)

 

We redirect Application data to in their network home drive, and exclude a large bunch of the local profile folders from being uploaded back to the server at logoff.

 

Since moving to the mandatory profile for the students, we've never had a corrupted one for over a year, and if a member of staff profile becomes b0rked, we just drop the original 700kb version back into their network path and it's back to square one when they next logon.

[simonstubbsets]

BoredGuy - so does that mean that for every student, the same profile is defined in Active Directory, then Staff have their own folder with a copy of the NTUser.dat file in?

[Boredguy]

No, we copy the NTUser.Man into the students own profile folder as part of the user creation script... just incase we want to make changes to a specific user.

 

So in AD, all users profiles point to \\servername\%username%\profile