Windows 7 Roaming Profiles

[Darylrese]

We currently use roaming profiles for staff and students. Students are still on XP and I have just upgraded all staff machines to Windows 7.

 

I plan on scraping roaming profiles for students when I upgrade workstations to Windows 7 as they are not needed for students, however I want to keep them for staff as it seemed to work quite well in my last school.

 

Having said this, I am having a few issues in my new school using this method as staff have laptops.

 

Staff are logging on in multiple places, for example on a classroom PC and their laptop at the same time. They then add / remove content on their desktop on the PC, log off, use their laptop, log off and of course the changes they made on the desktop have been overwritten by the copy on the laptop as that was the last device to be logged off.

 

Is there a way to stop this from happening? I want desktops, wallpapers and user settings to follow staff members which i'm sure can be achieved through group policy somehow?

 

How many of you use Roaming Profiles for staff?

Edited January 26, 2014 by Darylrese

[Sam_Brown]

When we moved to Windows 7 we used it as the opportunity to get rid of roaming profiles. It's saved us so many issues over the last few months and speeded up log on times considerably. We don't even give them permission to save to the desktop and instead they are forced to save everything to their home area.

 

I suppose if you really wanted to solve the desktop issue you could just redirect the desktop to a folder in their home area.

[Darylrese]

I would do this but i would probably be killed for getting rid of staffs desktop files and shortcuts. I understand the need for everyone to have their own desktop shortcuts so I don't want to take it away if I don't have to unless there's a better way of doing it. I don't think one desktop for all members of staff would work too well.

 

Redirection to a folder in their home drive might work. Do you allow staff to change wallpaper and start menu items?

[Sam_Brown]

You know what... I honestly can't remember off the top of my head. I'll have a look in the morning for you and let you know.

[psydii]

All our staff use laptops. So logging on and off is very rare.

 

Desktops are considered temporary working areas - somewhere they can dump large files without running out of space.

 

We do not roam or redirect them.

 

Same goes for the downloads folder.

 

Most others a redirected. Except AppData which some apps use so heavily it would bring the network to its knees.

 

We also exclude many folders with a tendency to grow massively from roaming. We keep an eye on profile size with soft quotas.

 

Other than not giving them Administrator rights, we do not restrict them in any other way.

Edited January 27, 2014 by psydii

[free780]

Roaming is ok but.

You need to limit the size of the profile.

You need to redirect several folders.

Most importantly you must train/tell staff.

Or you switch to local for desktops and have roaming for laptops.

[Darylrese]

Can we have local profiles for laptops and roaming for desktops?

[psydii]

Yes you can.

[Garacesh]

For the desktop machines, redirect their desktop to the network, like you would with their personal storage space. Any changes they make there will immediately be synced across all PC's they're logged onto, rather than being written back on logoff