Profiles for staff

[Liam]

Just curious as to what you all do for staff profiles this days.. I know there are many threads but I'm sure you will all help as always.

 

I have used mandatory profiles for both staff and students without issues for some time.. But the time has come to move to office 365. Let's forget using owa which I initially planned.. Staff hate it...Although I quite like it myself, we all know staff hate change.

 

My main concern is around thksr staff with larger mailboxes. Do you use ost. Do you save it locally. Redirect it and clear profiles? Or disable cached mode?

 

Ideally, I would like a local copy to speed things up and to obviously reduce bandwidth.

 

Machine storage could be an issue, something I would hate to run into.. Especially on those more communal machines.

 

What do you all do around the outlook and profiles.. I'm guessing your not as forgiving as me... And you just say... Use owa.. Lol..

 

Any help could be appreciated.

Liam

[Marshall_IT]

I've found it best not to put the outlook files in the roaming profile as this can drastically slow down log on.

You can however create a network location for the out files and redirect outlook to point to there via gpo.

[Liam]

Do you mean the ost. By default that doesn't sync with the profile because of size I thought.

 

I read it's best to keep it local as ms best practice.

 

At present I redirect app data.. Is that right or wrong. There in mo right or wrong answer I don't think. I just want to know what works best. I thkught about enabling the debate local cached copies after x days. Thst way the persistent logins will never be deleted. Until hols of course.

 

Thanks Marshall. Is this what you do? I seen the option to redirect pst abd ost but I didn't want to redirect to a network location.

[Marshall_IT]

I've not got many users that use outlook and most of them only on their office machine. I used to redirect the ost files at my last school.

[Liam]

Wheb we redirected app data it removed the send to folder from app data. No ideas why.

Any suggestions

[psydii]

Redirecting AppData can lead to unexpected behaviour, developers assume it is going to be local and some applications will cause significant performance issues. Also some types of data file really are not reliable when redirected, and these types of file are more likely to reside in appdata than in say the Documents folder.

 

ost and pst on network shares is a long standing "BAD IDEA' in fact if you phone MS PSS and say 'my file server is very slow" their first question is "have you got and users opening pst files from it?" and if you answer "no" they make you run a script to check anyway.

 

Roaming profiles for staff: Yes we always have done. Start by moving to non-mandatory profiles, and watch how they grow in size. identify which folders you don't want to roam (office apps autosave folders tend to grow, the desktop and Download folders are also biggies if you don't redirect them, flash cache, dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive folders are also good to exclude). I have found that when you add manual exclusions to roaming folders using a GPO it then becomes necessary to also manually prevent appdata\local and locallow from roaming too (if there are no manual exclusions these two folders are automatically excluded), I am not sure whether this is expected behaviour.

 

If you let the workstations keep the roaming profiles, outlook with sync up each time the user logs on. The first time it may take a good long while for all their mail to come down, but on subsequent logons it shouldn't take too long for all their new mail since last log on to that machine to appear.

 

My preferred solution is to go 1:1 for staff:devices, that way they always have everything they need at their fingertips exactly as they want it, and use Roaming Profiles to back up these preferences.

[Liam]

Thanks pal. I'll look into it.

[Liam]

I think I'll turn off redirection.. Face the headache thag Cones with thag and prevent some folders from roaming with a gpo.

 

Thanks again

[themightymrp]

I do something very similar to what @psydii mentions above.

 

Staff have roaming profiles but they aren't mandatory. I have most folders set up as redirection EXCEPT for AppData. I use GPO settings to exclude a variety of subfolders from the AppData to keep the size down (pretty much the same as he says above, including \Local and \LocalLow). It seems to work well with profiles ranging in size from about 10Mb up to 40Mb depending. That sort of size doesn't seem to affect login speeds too much.

 

Students on the other hand have a massively tied down mandatory roaming profile with redirection which gives them a profile of about 2Mb

 

EDIT - should really mention that 99% of our staff use the O365 web access email. There's only about 3 of us using full Outlook on our office machines

Edited January 15, 2015 by themightymrp

[synaesthesia]

We use mandatory profiles across the board, with only a single exception for the head's PA who uses full Outlook. Everyone else uses OWA. It's not entirely popular as we come from an extremely good Zimbra setup, but it does (usually) work and provides many benefits including easy access to onedrive etc. I would like to use Outlook in the long run but until they can fix azure AD for that to be feasible on mandatory profiles (likely to be Windows 10 territory) that won't happen. The huge benefits of mandatory over roaming vastly outweigh the small inconvenience of working around a new email system. We do get a few moans and mutters about OWA (including from ourselves) but nothing dealbreaking.