Roaming Profiles - Why have them?

[tdh1987]

Hi

 

We currently have roaming profiles enables for the staff but not for the students in the school. We are having a few problems with individual profiles.

 

We are running Server 2008R2 and Windows 7 on every machine bar a couple of Surfaces.

 

What are the benefits of having roaming profiles at all, if 99% of the staff only use their own laptop/workstation?

 

Thanks for reading

[ataylor]

We don't use roaming profiles at all. We have the same situation where staff are 1:1 with the computer they use.

[tdh1987]

I'm going to select a couple of teachers and give this a go. If anyone can suggest why this is a bad idea then please let me know.

 

Thanks

[Mako]

There won't be any real benefits if you have a situation where staff never leave their room or are tied to a single device.

 

As our IT suites are bookable, they can see a rotation of many different staff who can log in and access all of their favourites, bookmarks and whatnot anywhere in school.

 

If/when a profile becomes corrupted, all the favourites can be restored among other settings, which is an advantage. Unlike student accounts, which will only ever be stored locally, and any site-wide favourites etc are deployed via GPP. Anything they set by hand will be lost unless they log in to that specific computer again.

 

Staff can also rotate classrooms a lot, especially when its exam time, or to cover other staff etc. To not have roaming profiles for them would be a pain.

 

You would see a performance increase in logon times as you're not pulling stuff from the server all the time, there would be other benefits if it suits your environment.

 

However, if your staff have customised their profile quite heavily (GPP dependent), with favourites, links and whatnot, they'd be lost if the machine was ever reimaged or if the profile became corrupted.

[Koldov]

There are a lot of threads on here about roaming profiles. Like this one recently:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/behind-red-door/130835-perfect-roaming-profiles.html

 

@elsiegee40 has an interesting point (about half-way down on the third page) about how they might be used in schools.

 

I have never used them (thankfully I think) so cannot comment, as all our teaching staff have a 1:1 device (laptop) other pc's around the school are for students who have mandatory profiles, if anyone else logs-in (such as a TA) I guess it makes a local profile but there is usually nothing urgent to be saved and if there is their home drive is mapped by a log-on script.

 

Kol.

[synaesthesia]

Convenience is their biggest positive. Lower security, increase likelihood of infection, profile corruption etc are common negatives. We've gone mandatory and haven't looked back.

[PotNoodleTech]

I've always gone roaming but am looking at mandatory now as am getting a couple of corrupt profiles a week and it's a pain if there is a cached copy on a workstation.

[Boredguy]

We switched our students from roaming to mandatory last year as the number of corrupt profiles was getting silly each week.

Since using a mandatory one we've had a handful of issues over the last 12 months, and they have generally been due to the kids unplugging the network cabled with their feet at logon.

 

Our staff accounts are still configured as roaming profiles, but we rarely get corruption on their profiles, even when logging onto 4 or 5 different workstations during the day. We do limit what files are synchronised from the local profile back up to the network share but we might review it when Windows 9 comes along (since it's unlikely we will roll out Windows 8.1)